
Class ^ D/\ ( 7£ £> 



SERMONS 

BY 

JOHN-BAPTIST MASSILLON, 

BISHOP OF CLERMONT. 



TO WHICH IS PREFIXED 

THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



A NEW EDITION. 

COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME. 



GLASGOW: 

PRINTED FOR RICHARD GRIFFIN & CO. 

AND THOMAS TEGG, LONDON. 



MDCCCXXVII. 



STARKE, PRINTER, GLASGOW. 



MASSILLON'S SERMONS. 



V 



CONTENTS. 



Page 

I. On Salvation, . . . . . 1 

II. On the Small Number of the Saved, . . 19 

III. The Disgusts accompanying Virtue, . . 36 

IV. The Uncertainty of Righteousness in a State of Luke- 

warmness, . . . . . 51 

V. The Certainty of the Loss of Righteousness in a State of 

Lukewarmness, ..... 66 

VI. On Evil-Speaking, , . . . . 85 

VII. On the Employment of Time, . . . .104 

VIII. The Certainty of a Future State, . . . 120 

IX. On Death, ...... 137 

X. The Death of a Sinner, and that of a Righteous Cha- 

racter, . . . ' ( . . 154 

XI. On Charity, . . . . . .175 

XII. On Afflictions, . . . . . 196 

XIII. On Prayer, . . . . . .213 

XIV. Forgiveness of Injuries, .... 230 

XV. The Woman who was a Sinner, . . . 248 

XVI. The Word of God, .... 266 

XVII. On the Delay of Conversion, . . . 284< 

XVIII. On False Trust, 303 

XIX. On the Vices and Virtues of the Great, . • 319 

XX. On the Injustice of the World towards the Godly, . . 336 

XXI. Respect in the Temples' of God, . . . 357 , 

XXII. The Truth of Religion, . 375 



viii 



CONTENTS. 





Page 


XXIII. Doubts upon Religion, . ' . 


394 


XXIV. Evidence of the Law of God, 


413 


XXV. Immutability of the Law of God, 


432 


XXVI. For Christmas Day, 


446 


XXVII- For the Day of the Epiphany, 


461 


XXVIII. The Divinity of Jesus Christ, . 


485 


XXIX. On the Resurrection of Lazarus, 


512 


XXX. On the Day of Judgment, 


532 


XXXI. The Happiness of tne Just, . 


552 


XXXII. On the Dispositions for the Communion, 


569 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 



TO 

THE FIRST EDITION. 



It is equally proper for a Translator, as for an 
Author, to give some explanation (not apology, for 
surely a generous Public will require none, when the 
dissemination of virtue is evidently the purpose) of the 
production which he obtrudes upon the Public. 

This Translation was at first undertaken merely for 
the recreation, during illness, of the Translator. His 
admiration of Massillon's abilities increasing as he went 
on, he was induced to continue, far beyond his first in- 
tention: that animation, that unction, as D'Alembert 
says, which flowed from his pen on every subject, — that 
gentle, yet feeling address to the hearts of his hearers, 
and to which the most indifferent could not refuse at- 
tention, struck him so forcibly, that he could not re- 
flect, without surprise, that no translation of his works 
had as yet appeared in English. Impressed with a 
conviction of their moral tendency, he determined, in 
consequence of the approbation of some respectable 
clergymen, his friends, to publish a selection of such as, 
unconnected with local or temporary events in France, 
would, in his opinion, be an acceptable present to Chris- 
tains of every denomination. He now offers the pres- 
ent volumes to the Public; and so impressed is he with 



Vi 



translator's preface. 



a sense of their merit, that he is convinced that the weak- 
ness, or the inaccuracy of the Translation, can alone 
prevent a generous Public from receiving them favour- 
ably. 

In the Translation he has endeavoured, as much as in 
him lay, to convey the meaning and sentiments of his 
original; in doing of which, he may perhaps be thought 
sometimes too literal; but if the meaning be conveyed, 
surely the error is on the safest side ; for many of our 
translations may with much more propriety be called 
paraphrases than translations; and (at least in the Trans- 
lator's opinion) it is much better to err, in keeping rather 
too closely to the text, than, by studiously avoiding the 
appearance of literality, to render the sense both obscure 
and unintelligible. If the Translator be mistaken, it is 
an error which in future may easily be corrected; and, 
this being his first publication, he trusts that a generous 
Public will not cashier a subaltern; because he may not 
as yet be capable of discharging the duty of a general 
officer. 

The Translator takes this opportunity of returning 
his acknowledgments to his friends above mentioned, 
from whose advice he has reaped many advantages. 



LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



BY D'ALEMBERT. 



John-baptist Massillon was born in 1663 at Hieres in 
Provence. His father was a poor citizen of that small city. 
The obscurity of his birth, which gives such a relief to the 
splendour of his personal merit, should be the first topic of 
his praise; and it may be said of him, as of that illustrious 
Roman who owed nothing to his ancestors, 66 Videtur ex 
se natas, — He was the son of himself alone." But his hum- 
ble origin not only reflects high honour upon his own person; 
it is still more honourable to that enlightened government, 
which, having taken him from the midst of the people to 
place him at the head of one of the most extensive dioceses 
of the kingdom, confronted the prejudice too common even 
in our days, that Providence has not destined great places 
to the genius which it has produced in the lower ranks of 
society: If the disposers of ecclesiastical dignities had not pos- 
sessed the wisdom, courage, or good fortune, sometimes to 
forget this maxim of human vanity, the French clergy would 
have been deprived of the glory of reckoning the eloquent 
Massillon among their bishops. 

After finishing his grammatical studies, at the age of 
seventeen he entered into the Oratory. Resolved to conse- 
crate his labours to the church, he preferred, to indissoluble 
bonds which he might have assumed in some one of our very 
numerous religious orders, the free engagements contracted 
in a congregation on which the great Bossuet has bestowed 
this rare eulogy, — "That every one obeys, yet no one com- 
mands." Massillon preserved to the close of his life the most 
tender and pleasing recollection of the lessons he had re- 
ft 



11 



LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



spectable society, which, without intrigue and ambition, 
cherishing and cultivating literature through the sole wish 
of being useful, has acquired a distinguished name in the 
annals of art and science; and which, sometimes persecuted, 
and almost always little favoured, even by those from whom 
it might expect support, has done all the good it was per- 
mitted to do, without injuring a single person, even an enemy; 
which, in fine, has at all times obtained the regard of the 
wise by practising religion without littleness, and preaching 
it without fanaticism. 

Massillon's superiors soon formed a presage, from his first 
essays, of the honour he would confer on the congregation. 
They destined him to the pulpit; but it was only from obe- 
dience that he consented to fulfil their intentions: he alone 
did not foresee the celebrity with which they flattered him, 
and which was to be the recompense of his modesty and sub- 
mission. There are some confident minds which recognise, 
as it were by instinct, the object marked out for them by 
nature, and seize it with vigour; while others, humble and 
timid, require to be apprised of their powers, and by this honest 
ignorance of themselves are rendered only the more interest- 
ing, and the more worthy of being snatched from obscurity 
and presented to the renown which awaits them. 

The young Massillon at first did what he could to with- 
draw himself from this glory. He had already, from pure 
obedience, while yet in the province, pronounced funeral ora- 
tions on M. de Villeroy, archbishop of Lyons, and M. de 
Villars, archbishop of Vienne; and these two discourses, 
which were indeed first attempts, but attempts of a young 
man who already announced what he afterwards became, 
had the most brilliant success. The humble orator, affright- 
ed at his rising reputation, and fearing, as he said, " the de- 
mon of pride," resolved to escape from him for ever, by de- 
voting himself to the profoundest and even most austere re- 
tirement. He went and buried himself in the abbey of Sept- 
fons, where the same rule is followed as at la Trappe, and 
there took the habit. During his noviciate, the Cardinal 
de Noailles sent to the abbot of Sept-fons, whose virtue 
he respected, a charge which he had just published. The 
abbot, more religious than eloquent, but still retaining a de- 



LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



gree of self-love, at least on account of his community, wish- 
ed to make the prelate a reply worthy of his charge. He com- 
mitted the task to his exoratorian novice, and Massillon ex- 
ecuted it with as much success as promptness. The cardi- 
nal, astonished at receiving from this Thebais a work so well 
written, was not afraid of wounding the vanity of the pious ab- 
bot by asking him who was the author. The abbot named 
Massillon; and the prelate told him that it was not fit such 
a genius should, in the scripture-phrase, remain " hidden under 
a bushel." He required the novice to quit his habit, and re- 
sume that of the Oratory; and he placed him in the seminary 
of St. Magloire at Paris, with an exhortation to cultivate pul- 
pit eloquence. At the same time he took upon himself, as he 
said, the young orator's fortune; which Massillon limited to that 
of the apostles, that is, to the merest necessaries, and the most 
exemplary simplicity. 

His first sermons produced the effect that his superiors and 
the Cardinal de Noailles had foreseen. Scarcely did he begin 
to show himself in the pulpits of Paris, than he eclipsed 
almost all those who at that period shone in the same career. 
He had declared " that he would not preach like them," not 
through a presumptuous confidence in his superiority, but 
through an equally just and mature idea that if the minister 
fails with such a theme, he must be destitute of Christian elo- 
quence. He was persuaded that if the preacher of God's word 
on the one hand degrades himself by uttering common truths in 
trivial language; on the other, he misses his purpose by think- 
ing to captivate his audience with a long chain of reasoning 
which they are incapable of following: he knew that if all hear- 
ers are not blessed with an informed mind^ all have a heart, 
whence the preacher ought to seek his arms; that, in the pulpit, 
man ought to be shown to himself, not so much to disgust him 
by a shocking portrait, as to afflict him by the resemblance; 
and, in fine, that if it is sometimes useful to alarm and dis- 
quiet him, it is still more so to draw from him those tears of 
sensibility which are much more efficacious than the tears of 
despair. 

»Such was the plan Massillon proposed to himself, and he 
executed it like one who had conceived it; that is, like a 
master. He excels in that part of oratory which may stand 



iv 



LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



instead of all the rest, — that eloquence which goes right to 
the soul, but which agitates without confounding, appals 
without crushing, penetrates without lacerating it: he goes to 
the bottom of the heart in search of those hidden folds in 
which the passions are enwrapt, — those secret sophisms which 
they so artfully employ to blind and seduce us. To combat 
and destroy these sophisms it merely suffices him to develope 
them; but he does it in a language so affectionate and ten- 
der, that he subdues less than he attracts; and, even in dis- 
playing before us the picture of our vices, he knows how to 
attach and please us. His diction, always easy, elegant, and 
pure, never deviates from that noble simplicity without which 
there is neither good taste nor genuine eloquence. This 
simplicity, being joined in Massillon to the softest and most 
seducing harmony, borrows from it still new graces; and, 
what completes the charm of this enchanting style is, that so 
many beauties are felt to flow freely from the spring, without 
expense to their author. Sometimes, even, there escape from 
him, either in the expressions, the turns, or the sweet melody 
of his periods, negligencies which may be called happy, since 
they perfectly efface not only the stamp, but even the suspicion, 
of labour. It was by this inattention to self that Massillon made 
as many friends as auditors: he knew that the more an orator 
seems occupied in catching admiration, the less his hearers 
are disposed to grant it; and that this ambition is the rock fa- 
tal to so many preachers, who, intrusted (if I may so express 
myself, ) with the interests of God himself, choose to mix with 
it the little interests of their vanity. Massillon, on the contra- 
ry, thought it a very empty pleasure " to have to do," as 
Montaigne expresses it, " with people who always admire and 
make way for us;" especially at those seasons when it is so 
delightful to forget one's self, in order to be solely occupied 
with those unfortunate beings whom duty enjoins to console 
and instruct. He compared the studied eloquence of profane 
preachers to those flowers which stifle the products of harvest, 
and, though very agreeable to the sight, are equally hurtful to 
the crop. 

It seemed wonderful that a man, devoted by station to 
retirement, should know the world so well as to draw such 
exact pictures of the passions, especially of self-love. " I 
have learned to draw them," he candidly said, " by studying 



LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



v 



myself:" He proved it in a manner equally energetic and 
ingenuous, by his confession to one of his brethren, who 
congratulated him on the success of his sermons: " The 
devil," he replied, " has already told it me more eloquently 
than you." 

Massillon derived another advantage from that eloquence 
of the soul which he so well understood: as, in speaking to 
the heart of man, he spoke the language of all conditions. 
All went to hear his sermons; even unbelievers attended upon 
him, and often met with instruction where they only sought 
amusement. The reason was, that Massillon knew how to de- 
scend on their account to the only language they would hear, 
that of a philosophy, purely human in appearance, but 
which, finding every access to their hearts open, prepared the 
way for the Christian orator to approach them without effort 
and unresisted, and to obtain a conquest even without a com- 
bat. 

His action was perfectly suited to his species of eloquence. 
On entering the pulpit, he appeared thoroughly penetrated 
with the great truths he was about to utter: With eyes declin- 
ed, a modest and collected air, without violent motions, and 
almost without gestures, but animating the whole with a voice 
of sensibility, he diffused over his audience J;be religious emo- 
tion which his own exterior proclaimed, and caused himself to 
be listened to with that profound silence by which eloquence 
is better praised than by the loudest applauses. The reputation 
of his manner alone induced the celebrated Baron to attend 
on one of his discourses: on leaving the church, he said to a 
friend who accompanied him, " This man is an orator, and 
we are only players." 

The court soon wished to hear him, or rather to judge 
him. Without pride, as without fear, he appeared on this 
great and formidable theatre. He opened with distinguished 
lustre; and the exordium of his first discourse is one of the 
master-strokes of modern eloquence. Louis XIV. was then 
at the summit of power and glory, admired by all Europe, ad- 
ored by his subjects, intoxicated with adulation, and satiated 
with homage. Massillon took for his text a passage of Scripture 
apparently least applicable to such a prince; " Blessed are 
they that mourn;" and from this he had the art to draw a 



LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



eulogy the more noble and nattering, as it seemed dictated by 
the gospel itself, and such as an apostle might have made, 
" Sire," said he, " if the world were here speaking to your 
majesty, it would not address you with 6 Blessed are they that 
mourn;' 4 Blessed/ would it say, 4 the prince who never 
fought but to conquer; who has filled the universe with his 
name; who, in the course of a long and flourishing reign, has 
enjoyed with splendour all that men admire, the greatness 
of his conquests, the love of his people, the esteem of his ene- 
mies, the wisdom of his laws:' — but, sire, the gospel speaks 
not as the world speaks." The audience of Versailles, accus- 
tomed as they were to the Bossuets and Bourdaloues, were un- 
acquainted with an eloquence at the same time so delicate and 
so noble; in consequence, it excited in the assembly, not- 
withstanding the gravity of the place, an involuntary expres- 
sion of admiration. There only wanted, to render this passage 
still more impressive, that it should haA e been pronounced in 
the midst of the misfortunes which succeeded our triumphs, 
and at a time when the monarch, who, during fifty years, had 
experienced nothing but prosperity, lived only to sorrow. If 
ever Louis XIV. heard a more eloquent exordium, it was per- 
haps that of a religious missionary, who, on his first appearance 
before the king, thus began his discourse: — " Sire, I mean not 
to pay a compliment to your majesty, I have found none in the 
gospel." 

Truth, even when it speaks in the name of God, ought 
to content itself with knocking at the door of kings, and 
should never break it open. Massillon, convinced of this 
maxim, did not imitate some of its predecessors, who had 
displayed their zeal by preaching Christian Morality in the 
mansions of vice with an austerity capable of rendering it 
odious, and of exposing religion to the resentment of haughty 
and offended power. Our orator was always firm, but always 
respectful, while he announced to his sovereign the will of the 
Judge of kings. He filled the measure of his ministry, but 
he never surpassed it; and the monarch, who might have 
left his chapel discontented with the liberty of some other 
preachers, never left it after a sermon of Massillon, but 
" discontented with himself." These were the very words of 
the prince to his orator; words w hich contained the highest 



LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



rii 



eulogy he could give; yet one, which so many preachers be- 
fore and since Massillon have not even wished to obtain, while 
they were more solicitous to please the critics than to convert 
sinners. 

Successes so brilliant and repeated did not fail of their 
usual effect; they created Massillon implacable enemies, 
especially among those who considered themselves as his 
rivals. Their aim was, if possible, to shut the mouth of so 
formidable a competitor; but this was only to be done by an 
accusation against his doctrine, and on this delicate point 
the preacher gave not the least scope to their charitable in- 
tentions. He was, indeed, member of a congregation, the 
opinions of which were then much the object of suspicion; 
and through this pious consideration several of his brethren 
had been dexterously excluded from the pulpit of Versailles. 
But Massillon's sentiments, daily exposed to court criticism, 
were so irreproachably orthodox that they baffled the kindest 
scrutiny of hatred. The church and the nation already des- 
tined him to the episcopacy; and envy, usually blind to its 
own interests, might with subtiler policy, have regarded this 
dignity as a decent mode of burying his talents, by banish- 
ing him to a distance from Paris and the court. It did not 
carry so far its dangerous penetration; but, considering a bish- 
opric only in the light of a splendid recompense, it resolved 
to make a last effort to deprive the orator of what he had so 
well merited. The means employed were to calumniate his 
morals; and, according to custom, ears were found ready to 
hear, and hearts to believe, the charge. The sovereign him- 
self, so artful is falsehood in insinuating itself to the presence of 
monarchs, was shaken, if not convinced: and the same prince, 
who had told Massillon, " that he meant to hear him every two 
years," seemed to fear giving to another church the orator he 
had reserved to himself. 

Louis XIV. died; and the Regent, who honoured the talents 
of Massillon, and despised his enemies, nominated him to the 
bishoprick of Clermont. He wished also that the court should 
hear him once more; and engaged him to preach a Lent course 
before the King, then nine years of age. 

These sermons, composed in less than three months, are 
known by the name of Petit Careme (Little Lent), They are 



hlFE OF THE AUTHOR, 



perhaps, if not the master-piece, at least the true model, of pul- 
pit eloquence. The great sermons of this orator may have more 
animation and vehemence: The eloquence of the Petit Careme 
is more pathetic and insinuating; and the charm resulting 
from it is augmented by the interesting nature of the sub- 
ject, and by the inestimable value of those simple and affect- 
ing lessons which, intended to penetrate with equal force and 
softness the heart of a monarch yet a child, seem to prepare 
the happiness of millions of men, by showing what they have 
a right to expect from the prince who is to govern them. Here 
the preacher places before the * eyes of sovereigns the dan- 
gers and the evils of supreme power; truth flying the throne, 
and concealing herself even from the princes who seek her; 
the unmeasured confidence with which even the justest praises 
may inspire them; the almost equal danger of that weakness 
which has no opinion of its own, and that pride which never 
listens to another's; the fatal influence of their vices in cor- 
rupting and debasing a whole nation; the detestable glory 
of conquering kings cruelly purchased by blood and tears; in 
fine, the Supreme Being himself, placed between oppressor 
kings and oppressed people, to intimidate the one and avenge 
the other: such is the object of the Petit Careme, worthy of 
being learned by all children destined to the throne, and 
meditated by all men intrusted with governing the world. 
Some severe censurers, however, have charged these excellent 
discourses with being too uniform and monotonous; they con- 
tain, according to them, but a single idea constantly recurring 
— that of the kindness and beneficence due from the great 
and powerful of the earth to the little and feeble, whom nature 
has created their fellows, humanity has made their brethren 
and fortune has doomed to wretchedness. But, without in- 
quiring into the justice of this censure, we may say that the 
truth here mentioned is so consolatory to all who groan under 
affliction, so precious in the education of a prince, and especial- 
ly so necessary to be impressed on the callous hearts of courti- 
ers, that humanity may bless the orator who has inculcated it 
with'so much force and perseverance. 

The year in which Massillon pronounced these discourses, 
was that in which he entered the French Academy. The 
date of his admission was February 23d, IT 19. The Abbe 



LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



Fleury, who received him in his capacity of director, among 
other praises, gave him that of having accommodated his in- 
struction to the tender age of the king. " You seem," said 
he, " to have imitated the prophet, who, in order to resus- 
citate the son of the Shunamite, contracted as it were his 
dimensions, by placing his mouth upon the mouth, his eyes 
upon the eyes, his hands upon the hands of the child; and, 
having thus recalled the vital heat, restored him alive and 
vigorous to his mother." 

The director's discourse contains another passage equally 
edifying and remarkable. Massillon had just been consecra- 
ted a bishop; and no place at court, no business, no pretext 
could be urged to keep him from his diocese. The Abbe 
Fleury, an inflexible observer of the cannons, while he ad- 
mitted the new member, had his eyes fixed upon the rigorous 
duties which the episcopacy imposed upon him, in comparison 
with which, those of academician entirely disappeared. Far, 
then, from inviting him to frequent attendance on the aca- 
demy, he exhorted him to a perpetual absence; and he ren- 
dered his counsel more cogent by the obliging manner in 
which he expressed his regret for its necessity. " We foresee 
with grief," said he, " that we are about to lose you for ever, 
and that the indespensable law of residence will sequestrate you 
without return from our assemblies: we cannot hope to see 
you again, but when some vexatious business shall, in spite of 
yourself tear you from your church." 

This counsel had the more weight, as he to whom it was 
addressed had already given it himself. He departed for 
Clermont, and only returned on indispensable, consequently 
rare, occasions. He gave all his cares to the happy flock 
intrusted to him by Providence. He did not conceive that 
his episcopal function, which he had acquired in consequence 
of his success in the pulpit, gave him a dispensation from 
again ascending it, and that he ought to cease being useful be- 
cause he had been rewarded. He consecrated to the instruc- 
tion of the poor those talents which had so often been applaud- 
ed by the great; and preferred, to the noisy praises of cour- 
tiers, the simple and serious attention of a less brilliant but 
more docile audience. Perhaps the most eloquent of his dis- 
courses are his conferences with his clergy. He preaches to 



X 



LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



them the virtues of which he gave the example; — disinterest- 
edness, simplicity, forgetfulness of self, the active and prudent 
ardour of enlightened zeal, widely different from that fanaticism 
which is only a blind, and often a very suspicious zeal: modera- 
tion was, indeed, his ruling character. He loved to assemble 
at his country seat Oratorians and Jesuits, whom he accustom- 
ed to endure, and almost to love each other. He set them to 
play together at chess, and exhorted them never to engage in 
more serious warfare. The conciliatory spirit which shone in 
his conduct, and his well-known sentiments on the scandal of 
theological quarrels, caused the government to wish that he 
should try to bring to an agreement the Cardinal de Noailles, 
and those who attacked the doctrine of this pious archbishop; 
but this impartiality in this negotiation produced its usual effect, 
of dissatisfying both parties. His sage remonstrances in favour 
of peace and union were fruitless; and he learned, by his own 
experience, that it is often easier to persuade unbelievers, than 
to reconcile those who have so much interest in uniting to con- 
found them. 

Deeply penetrated with the real obligations of his station, 
Massillon was especially attentive to fulfil that first and most 
respectable of episcopal duties, the duty, or rather the plea- 
sure, of beneficence. He reduced his rights as bishop to 
very moderate sums, and would entirely have abolished 
them had he not thought himself obliged to respect the 
patrimony of his successors, that is, to leave them wherewith 
to perform good actions. Within two years he sent twenty 
thousand livres to the hospital of Clermont. All his re- 
venue belonged to the poor. His diocese preserves the re- 
membrance of his deeds after thirty years; and his memory 
is daily honoured with the most eloquent of funeral orations, 
that of the tears of one hundred thousand distressed ob- 
jects. During his life- time he had anticipated this testimony. 
When he appeared in the streets of Clermont, the people 
prostrated themselves before him, crying, " Long live our 
father!" Hence it was a frequent observation of this virtu- 
ous prelate, that his episcopal brethren did not sufficiently 
feel the degree of consideration and authority they might 
derive from their station; not, indeed, by pomp, or by 
a punctilious devotion, still less by the grimaces and in- 



LIFE OF THE ATUTHOR. 



xi 



trigues of hypocrisy, but by those virtues which are recog- 
nised by the hearts of the people, and which, in a minister 
of true religion, represent to all eyes that just and benefi- 
cent Being of which he is the image. 

Among the countless alms he gave, there were some which 
he concealed with the greatest care, not only to favour the 
delicacy of unfortunate individuals, but sometimes to spare 
whole communities the sensation of inquietude and fear, 
however groundless, which these donations might occasion 
them. A numerous convent of nuns, had, for several days, 
been without bread. The sisterhood had resolved to perish 
rather than make known their shocking distress, through 
the apprehension that it might cause the suppression of their 
house, to which they were more attached than to life. The 
bishop of Clermont learned at the same time their extreme 
necessity and the motive of their silence. Eager to give 
them relief, he was fearful of alarming them by seeming in- 
formed of their situation; he therefore secretly sent them a 
very considerable sum, which rendered their subsistence se- 
cure, till he had found means to provide them with other 
resources; and it was not till after his death that they be- 
came acquainted with the benefactor to whom they were so 
greatly indebted. 

He not only lavished his fortune upon the indigent; he 
further assisted them with equal zeal and success, by his 
pen. Being a witness in his diocesan visits, of the wretched- 
ness under which the inhabitants of the country groaned, 
and finding his revenue insufficient to supply with bread so 
many miserable creatures who asked it, he wrote to the 
court in their favour; and, by the strong and affecting pic- 
ture he drew of their necessities, he obtained for them 
either donations, or a considerable diminution of their taxes. 
His letters on this interesting subject are said to be master- 
pieces of pathetic eloquence, superior to the most touching 
of his sermons. 

The more sincerely he respected religion, the more he 
despised the superstitions which degrade it, and the more 
zealous he was to destroy them. He abolished, though not 
without difficulty, some very ancient and very indecent pro- 
cessions which the barbarism of the dark ages had established 



LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



in his diocese, and which travestied the divine worship into 
a scandalous masquerade. The inhabitants of Clermont 
were used to run to these exhibitions in crowds, some 
through a stupid devotion, others to turn this religious 
farce into ridicule. The clergy of the city, through fear of 
the people, who were attached to these shows in proportion 
to their absurdity, dared not publish the mandate for their 
suppression. Massillon ascended the pulpit, published his 
own mandate and caused himself to be heard by a tumul- 
tuous audience who would have insulted any other preacher: 
— such was the fruit of his virtue and beneficence ! 

He died, as Fenelon died, and as every bishop ought to 
die, without money and without debts. It was on the 28th 
of September, 1742 that the church, eloquence, and huma- 
nity, sustained this irreparable loss. 

A recent incident, well calculated to affect feeling hearts, 
affords a proof how dear the memory of Massillon is, not 
only to the indigent whose tears he dried, but to all who 
have known him. Some years since, a traveller who hap- 
pened to be at Clermont, wished to see the country seat 
where the prelate was accustomed to pass great part of the 
year. He applied to an ancient grand-vicar, who, since the 
bishop's death, had not had resolution to return to this 
country mansion, now deprived of its inhabitants. He con- 
sented, however, to satisfy the traveller's desire, notwith- 
standing the pain he expected from revisiting a spot so sadly 
dear to his remembrance. They went together, and the 
grand-vicar showed every thing to the stranger. " Here," 
said he, with tears in his eyes, " is the valley where this 
worthy prelate took his walks with us: here is the arbour 
under which he used to repose while he read: this is the 
garden which he cultivated with his own hands." They 
then entered the house, and when they came to the chamber 
in whicb Massillon had breathed his last; " This," said the 
grand- vicar, 6 i is the place where we lost him;" and, as he 
spoke these words, he fainted away. The shade of Titus or 
Marcus Aurelius might have envied such a homage ! 

Massillon has been compared with Bourdaloue, as often 
as Cicero with Demosthenes, and Racine with Corneille. 
Parallels of this kind, fertile topics for antithesis, prove no- 



LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



Xlll 



thing more than the degree of ingenuity in him who makes 
them. We shall resign this common-place matter without 
regret, and confine ourselves to a single reflection. When 
Bourdaloue appeared, the pulpit was yet barbarous; rivalling, 
as Massillon himself observed, the theatre in buffoonery, or 
the schools in dryness. That Jesuit orator was the first who 
gave to Religion a language worthy of her: it was solid, se- 
rious, and, above all, strictly and closely logical. If he who 
enters an untrodden path has many thorns to obstruct him, 
he also enjoys great advantages, for his advance is more 
marked, and his immediate celebrity greater, than those of 
his successors. The public, long accustomed to the reign of 
Bourdaloue, who had been the first object of their venera- 
tion, were long persuaded that he could have no rival, es- 
pecially while Massillon was living, and Bourdaloue from Ms 
tomb no longer heard the cry of the multitude in his favour. 
At length, Death, which brings justice in its train, has as- 
signed to each orator his proper place; and Envy, which had 
excluded Massillon from that which was his due, may now 
seat him in it without the fear of his enjoying it. We shall, 
however, refrain from giving him a pre-eminence which grave 
authorities would disallow: it is Bourdaloue's greatest glory, 
that the superiority of Massillon is still disputed; but if it were 
to be decided by the number of readers, the advantage would 
be on the side of Massillon. Bourdaloue is little read but by 
preachers and devotees; his rival is in the hands of all who 
read; and we must be permitted to say, as completing his 
Eulogy, that the most celebrated writer of our age and nation 
is particularly assiduous in the perusal of this great orator's 
sermons; that Massillon is his model for prose, as Racine is 
for verse; and that the Petit Careme is always laid on his table 
by the side of Athctliah. 

If, however, a kind of parallel were to be drawn between 
these two illustrious orators, we might say, with an intelli- 
gent judge, that Bourdaloue argues the best, and Massillon 
is the most pathetic; and that a sermon excellent in all re- 
spects would be one, of which Bourdaloue should write the 
first head, and Massillon the second. Perhaps a still more 
perfect discourse would be one in which they should not ap- 
pear apart, but their talents, melted together, should as it were 



xiv 



LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



mutually penetrate each other and the logician should at the 
same time write with pathos and sensibility. 

We ought not to conceal, that all the sermons of our elo- 
quent academician, as well as his Petit Careme, are accused of 
the fault of frequently presenting in the same page only a single 
idea, varied, indeed, with all the richness of expression, but, 
by its fundamental uniformity, somewhat dragging in its enun- 
ciation. The same criticism has been made upon Seneca, but 
with more justice: that writer, solely ambitious of astonishing 
his reader by the profusion of wit with which he overwhelms 
him, becomes the more wearisome, as he seems to weary 
himself by a pompous display of riches, which he collects on 
all sides with manifest effort. Massillon, having his heart 
solely filled with the interests of his hearer, appears to present 
before him in many forms the truth he wishes to impress upon 
him, only through fear lest he should not engrave it deeply 
enough on his soul. Not only, therefore, do we pardon him 
these tender repetitions, but we feel obliged to him for the 
motive which has multiplied them: we are convinced that they 
proceed from one who delights in the love of his fellow-crea- 
tures, and whose overflowing sensibility requires room for ex- 
pansion. 

It is surprising that the French clergy, who possessed so 
eminent an orator, should not once have nominated him to 
preach in their assemblies. He never desired this honour, 
but left to moderate capacities and ambitious tempers a petty 
glory of which he had no need. He was even rarely chosen 
a member of the Assembly; and readily consented, as he 
said, that prelates less attached than himself to residence 
should have recourse to this decent excuse for intermitting 
it. The marked indifference, which his episcopal brethren 
seemed to display towards him was neither intentional on 
their parts nor even voluntary: it was the obscure work of 
some men in place, who, from motives worthy of them, se- 
cretly kept Massillon out of the view of the court, not as an 
intriguer, — for they knew him too well to believe him one, — 
but as an illustrious and respected prelate, whose superiority, 
viewed too near, might have shone with a lustre which power- 



LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



XV 



ful men of inferior capacity can never bear. But what a loss 
to such an auditory was a preacher such as Massillon? What 
could be a more interesting topic than to address the assem- 
bled princes of the church on the august duties imposed on 
them by their dignity; on the great examples expected from 
them by a whole people; on the right they may acquire from 
the sanctity of their character and of their lives, to speak the 
truth to kings, and to lay at the foot of the throne the 
complaint of the innocent and the oppressed? Could it be 
thought that Massillon was unworthy to treat so grand a sub- 
ject, or was it rather feared that he would treat it with too 
much eloquence? 

This great orator, either before or after becoming a bishop, 
pronounced some funeral orations, the merit of which was 
eclipsed by that of his sermons. If he had not that inflexibi- 
lity which proclaims the truth with harshness, he had that 
candour which does not permit to disguise it. Even through 
the praises which in these discourses he grants to decorum, 
or perhaps to truth, the secret judgment of his own heart 
concerning the persons whom it was his office to celebrate, 
escapes from his natural frankness, and swims on the surface, 
as it were, in spite of himself: and it is apparent, on reading 
them, that there are some of his heroes whose history he would 
rather have composed than their eulogy. 

Once alone a failure of memory happened to him on preach- 
ing. Deceived by the mortification this slight accident caused 
him, he thought it would be much better to read than to re- 
peat his sermons. We venture to differ from him in this 
point. Reading forces an orator either to renounce that 
free action which is the soul of the pulpit, or to render it ri- 
diculous by an air of preparation and exaggeration which 
destroys its nature and truth. Massillon seems himself to 
have been sensible that the greatest merit in an oratorical dis- 
course, with regard to effect, is, that it should appear pro- 
duced on the spot, without any trace of premeditation; for 
when he was asked, which of his sermons he thought the best, 
he replied, " that which I recollect the best." 

Though by taste and duty devoted to Christian eloquence, 
he sometimes, by way of relaxation, exercised his faculties 



xvi 



LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 



upon other objects. It is asserted that he left in manuscript 
a life of Corregio. He could not have selected for his subject 
a painter whose talents were more analogous to his own; for 
he himself was, if the expression may be allowed, the Cor- 
regio of orators. It may be added, that as Corregio had 
formed himself by opening a new track after Raphael and 
Titian, so Massillon, who had also found out a new walk of 
pulpit eloquence, might have said, on comparing himself to 
other orators, what Corregio did on viewing the pictures of 
other artists, — " I too am a painter." 



SERMONS, 



SERMON I. 
ON SALVATION. 
John vii. 6. 

My time is not pet come; but your time is always ready. 

The reproach which is here directed by Jesus Christ, against 
his relations according to the flesh, who pressed him to show 
himself to the world, and to go up to Jerusalem, in order to 
acquire those honours which were due to his great talents, may 
with propriety be directed against the greatest part of this au- 
dience. The time which they give to their fortune, to their 
advancement, to their pleasures, is always ready; it is always 
time to labour towards the acquirement of wealth and glory, 
and to satisfy their passions; — that is the time of man: But the 
time of Jesus Christ, that is to say, the time of working out 
their salvation, is never ready; they dela'y, they put it off; they 
always expect its arrival, and it never arrives. 

The slightest worldly interests agitate them, and make them 
undertake every thing; for what is the world itself, whose de- 
ceitful ways they follow, but an eternal agitation, where the 
passions set every thing in motion; where tranquillity is the only 
pleasure unknown; where cares are honourable; where those 
who are at rest think themselves unhappy; where all is toil and 
affliction of spirit; in a word, where all are in motion, and all 
are deceived? Surely, my brethren, when we see men so occu- 
pied, so interested, so patient in their pursuits, we would sup- 
pose them labouring for everlasting ages, and for riches which 
ought to secure their happiness: How can we comprehend, that 
so much toil and agitation has nothing in view but a fortune, 
whose duration scarcely equals that of the labours which have 
gained it; and that a life so rapid is spent with so much fatigue, 
in the search of wealth which must perish along with it? 

A 



2 



ON SALVATION. 



[Serm. I. 



- Nevertheless, a mistake, which the slightest investigation is 
sufficient to expose, is become the error of by far the majority. 
In vain does religion call us to more necessary and more im- 
portant cares; in vain it announces to us, that to labour for 
what must pass away, is only amassing, at a great expense, 
heaps of sand, which tumble upon our heads, as fast as we raise 
them up; that the highest pitch of elevation to which we can 
attain here below, is always that which verges upon our death, 
and is the gate of eternity; and that nothing is worthy of man, 
but what will endure as long as man. The cares of the passions 
are always weighty and important: The steps alone which we 
take for heaven, are weak and languid: Salvation alone we 
consider as an amusement: We toil for frivolous riches, as if 
we laboured for eternal possessions; we labour for eternal pos- 
sessions, as if we toiled for frivolous riches. 

Yes, my brethren, our cares for this world are always anima- 
ted; obstacles, fatigues, disappointments, nothing can repulse us: 
Our cares for this world are always prudent: dangers, snares, 
perplexities, competitions, nothing can make us mistake our 
aim; whereas, our cares for salvation bear a very different cha- 
racter : Nothing can be more languid, or less interesting to us, 
although obstacles and disgusts there are so much to be dreaded; 
nothing can be more inconsiderate, although the multiplicity of 
ways, and the number of rocks for us to split upon, render mis- 
takes in it so familiar and common. 

We must labour, therefore, towards its accomplishment, with 
fervour and prudence; with fervour, in order not to be repulsed; 
with prudence, in order not to be mistaken. 

Part I. — Undoubtedly nothing in this life ought to interest 
us more than the care of our eternal salvation. Besides that this - 
is the grand affair upon which our all depends, we ^even have 
not, properly speaking, any other upon the earth; and the infi- 
nite and diverse occupations attached to our places, to our rank, 
to our situations in life, ought to be only different modes of la- 
bouring towards our salvation. 

Nevertheless, this care so glorious, to which every thing we 
do, and whatever we are, relate, is of all others the most des- 
pised; this chief care, which should be at the head of all our 
other pursuits, gives place to them all in the detail of our actions; 
this care so amiable, and to which the promises of faith, and the 
consolations of grace, attach so many comforts, is of all others 
become for us the most disgusting, and the most melancholy. 
And, behold, my brethren, from whence springs this want of 
fervour in the business of our eternal salvation; we pursue it 
without esteem, without preference, and without inclination. 
Let us investigate and illustrate these ideas. 

It is a very deplorable error, that mankind has attached the 



Serm. I.] 



ON SALVATION. 



most pompous names to all the enterprises of the passions; and 
that the cares for our salvation have not, in the opinions of 
men, been capable of meriting the same honour and the same 
esteem. Military toils are regarded by us as the path of repu- 
tation and glory; the intrigues and the commotions which con- 
tribute to our advancement in the world, are looked upon as the 
secrets of a profound wisdom; schemes and negotiations which 
arm mankind against each other, and which frequently make 
the ambition of an individual the source of public calamities, 
pass for extent of genius and superiority of talents; the art of 
raising, from an obscure patrimony, a monstrous and overgrown 
fortune, at the expense often of justice and probity, is the science 
of business and individual good management. In a word, the 
world has found out the secret of setting off, by honourable titles, 
all the different cares which are connected with the things of 
this earth: (The actions of faith alone, which shall endure eter- 
nally, which shall form the history of the age to come, and shall 
be engraven during all eternity upon the immortal columns of 
the heavenly Jerusalem, are accounted idle and obscure occu- 
pations; the lot of weak and limited souls, and have nothing 
which exalt them in the eyes of men. Such, my brethren, is 
the first cause of our indifference towards the business of our 
salvation : We do not sufficiently esteem that holy undertaking, 
to labour at it with fervour. 

Now, I do not think it necessary to stop here, and combat an 
illusion, which so flagrantly violates right reason. For what is it 
tliat can render a work glorious to the person who undertakes it? 
Is it the duration and the immortality which it promises in the 
memory of man? Alas ! all the monuments of pride will perish 
with the world which has reared them up; whatever we do for 
the earth, will experience the same destiny which it will one 
day undergo: Victories and conquests, the most splendid enter- 
prises, and all the history of the sinners whose names adorn the 
present age, will be effaced from the remembrance of men; the 
works of the just alone will be immortal, and, written for ever 
in the book of life, will survive the entire ruin of the universe. 
Is it the recompense which is held out to us for it? But who- , 
ever is unable to render us happy, is consequently unable to re- 
compense us; and there is no other who has that power but 
God himself. Is it the dignity of the occupations to which they 
engage you? But the most honourable cares of the world are 
merely games, on which our error and absurdity have bestowed 
serious and pompous names : Here, on the contrary, every thing 
is great: We love the author of our existence alone; we adore 
the Sovereign of the universe; we serve an Almighty Master; 
we covet only eternal riches; we form projects for heaven 
alone; we labour for an immortal crown. 

What is there upon the earth, then, more glorious or mor 
worthy of man than the cares of eternity? Prosperities 



4 



ON SALVATION. 



[Serm. I. 



honourable anxieties; splendid employments, an illustrious ser- 
vitude; reputation is frequently a public error; titles and dig- 
nities are rarely the fruit of virtue, and, at the most, serve only 
to adorn our tombs and embellish our ashes; great talents, if 
faith does not regulate their use, are only great temptations; 
deep knowledge, a wind which inflates and corrupts, if faith 
does not correct its venom; all these are only grand, by the use 
which may be made of them towards salvation: Virtue alone is 
estimable for itself. 

Nevertheless, if our competitors are more successful, and 
more elevated than we in the world, we view their situation 
with envious eyes ; and their aggrandisement, in humbling our 
pride, re-animates the fervour of our designs, and gives new life 
to our expectations; but it happens sometimes, that the accom- 
plices of our pleasures, changed suddenly into new men, nobly 
break all the shameful bonds of the passions, and, borne upon 
the wings of grace, enter, in our sight, into the path of salva- 
tion, whilst they leave us behind them, to wander still unfor- 
tunately at the pleasure of our illicit desires. We view with a 
tranquil eye the prodigy of their change; and their lot, far from 
exciting our envy, and awaking in us any weak desires of salva- 
tion, only induces us, perhaps, to think on replacing the void 
which their retreat has made in the world; of elevating our- 
selves to those dangerous offices from which they have just des- 
cended through motives of religion and faith: What shall I say? 
We become, perhaps the censurers of their virtues: We seek 
elsewhere than in the infinite treasures of grace, the' secret mo- 
tives of their change; to the work of God we give views entirely 
worldly : and our deplorable censures become the most dangerous 
trials of their repentance. It is thus, O my God! that Thou 
sheddest avenging darkness over iniquitous passions ! Whence 
comes this? We want esteem for the holy undertaking of sal- 
vation: This is the first cause of our indifference. 

In the Second place, We labour in it with indolence, because 
we do not make a principal object of its attainment, and because 
we never give a preference to it over our other pursuits. In 
effect, my brethren, we all wish to be saved; the most deplor- 
able sinners do not renounce this hope; we even wish, that 
amongst our actions there may always be found some which re- 
late to our salvation; for none deceive themselves so far as to 
believe, that they shall be entitled to the glory of the holy, 
without having ever made a single exertion towards rendering 
themselves worthy of it; but the point in which we commonly 
deceive ourselves is, the rank which we give to those works, 
amidst the other occupations which divide our life. 

• The trifiles, the attentions which we lavish so profusely in our 
intercourse with society, the functions of a charge, domestic ar- 

'ngements, passions and pleasures, their times and their mo- 
> marked in our days? Where do we place the work of 



Serm. I.] ON SALVATION. 



5 



salvation? What rank do we give to this special care, above our 
other cares? Do we even make a business of it? And, to enter 
into the particulars of your conduct, What do you perform for 
eternity, which you do not for the world an hundred-fold? You 
sometimes employ a small portion of your wealth in religious cha- 
rities; but what are these when compared to the sums which you 
sacrifice every day to your pleasures, to your passions, and to your 
caprices? In the morning you, perhaps, raise up your mind to 
the Lord in prayer; but does not the world, in a moment, re- 
sume its place in your heart, and is not the remainder of the 
day devoted to it? You regularly attend, perhaps, in order to 
fulfil the external duties of religion; but, without entering into 
the motives which frequently carry you there, this individual 
exercise of religion, is it not compensated by devoting the re- 
mainder of the day to indolent and worldly pursuits? You some- 
times correct your inclinations; you perhaps bear with an in- 
jury; you undertake the discharge of some pious obligation; 
but these are individual and insulated exertions, out of the com- 
mon track, and which are never followed by any regular conse- 
quences; you will be unable to produce, before the Lord, a 
single instance of these in your favour, without the enemy hav- 
ing it at same time in his power to reckon a thousand against 
you; salvation occupies your intervals alone; the world has, as 
I may say, the foundation and the principal:* The moments are 
for God, our entire life is for ourselves. 

I know, my brethren, that, with regard to this, you feel sen- 
sibly the injustice and the danger of your own conduct. You 
confess, that the agitations of the world, of business, and of 
pleasures, almost entirely occupy you, and that a very little 
time, indeed, remains for you to reflect upon salvation: But, in 
order to tranquillize yourselves, you say, that some future day, 
when you shall be more at ease; when affairs of a certain nature 
shall be terminated; when particular embarrassments shall be 
at an end; and, in a word, when certain circumstances shall no 
longer exist, you will then think seriously upon your salvation, 
and the business of eternity shall then become your principal 
occupation : But, alas ! your deception is this, that you regard 
salvation as incompatible with the occupations attached to the 
station in which Providence has placed you: For, cannot you 
employ that station as the means of your sanctification ? Can 
you not exercise in it all the Christian virtues? Penitence, 
should these occupations be painful and distressing; clemency, 
pity, justice, if they establish you in authority over your fellow- 
creatures? Submission to the will of Heaven, if the success 
does not correspond sometimes with your expectations? A ge- 
nerous forgiveness of injuries, if you suffer oppression or calumny 
in that station: Confidence in God alone, if in it you experience 
the injustice or the inconstancy of your masters? Do not many 
individuals of your rank and station, in the same predicament 



6 



ON SALVATION. 



[Serm. I. 



as you find yourselves, lead a pure and Christian life? Yon 
know well, that God is to be found every where; for, in those 
happy moments when you have sometimes been touched with 
grace, is it not true, that every thing recalled you to God? 
That even the dangers of your station became the vehicles of 
instruction, and means of cure for you; that the world disgust- 
ed you even with the world; that you found, continually and 
every where, the secret of offering up a thousand invisible sa- 
crifices to the Almighty, and of making your most hurried and 
tumultuous occupations the sources of holy reflections, or of 
praiseworthy and salutary examples? Why do you not culti- 
vate these impressions of grace and salvation? It is not your 
situation in life, it is your infidelity and weakness, which have 
extinguished them in your heart. 

Joseph was charged with the management of a great king- 
dom; he alone supported the whole weight of the government; 
nevertheless did he forget the Lord, who had broken asunder 
his chains and justified his innocence? Or, in order to serve 
the God of his fathers, did he delay till a successor should come 
and restore that tranquillity to hiin which his new dignities had 
necessarily deprived him of? On the contrary, he knew how 
to render serviceable towards the consolations of his brethren, 
and the happiness of the people of God, a prosperity which he 
acknowledged to be held only from his Almighty hand. That 
officer of the Queen of Etliiopia, who is mentioned in the Acts 
of the Apostles, had the sole government of her immense riches : 
every particular with regard to tributes and subsidies: and the 
administration of all the public revenues were intrusted to his 
fidelity. Now, this abyss of cares and embarrassments did not 
deprive him of leisure to seek, in the prophecies of Isaiah, the 
salvation he expected, and the words of eternal life. Place your- 
selves in the most agitated stations, you will find examples of 
upright souls, who in them have wrought their sanctification : 
The court may become the asylum of virtue, as well as the 
cloister; places and employments may be the aids, as well as 
the rocks of piety; and when, in order to return to God, we 
delay till a change of station shall take place, it is a sure mark 
that we do not as yet wish to change our heart. Besides, when 
we say that salvation ought to be your sole employment, we do 
not pretend that you should renounce all other pursuits: for 
you would then <Jepart from the order of God: we only wi>h 
you to connect them with your salvation; that piety may sanc- 
tify your occupations; that faith may regulate them; that reli- 
gion may animate them; that the fear of the Lord may mode- 
rate them: In a word, that salvation may be as the centre to 
which they all tend. For, to wait till you shall be in a more 
tranquil situation, and freer froni worldly perplexities, is not 
only an illusion which Satan employs to delay your repentance, 
but it is also an outrage upon the religion of Jesus Christ; you 



Serm. I.] 



ON SALVATION. 



r 



thereby justify the reproaches formerly made against it by the 
enemies of the Christians : it would seem that you look upon it 
as incompatible with the duties of prince, corn-tier, public cha- 
racter, and father of a family : Like them, you seem to believe, 
that the gospel proposes only maxims unfortunate and inimical 
to society; and that, were it believed, and strictly observed, it 
would be necessary to quit all; to exclude ourselves from the 
world; to renounce all public concerns: to break all the ties of 
duty, of humanity, of authority, which unite us to the rest of 
mankind; and to live as if we were alone upon the earth; in 
place of which, it is the gospel alone which makes us fulfil all 
these duties as they ought to be fulfilled; it is the religion of 
Jesus Christ which can alone form pious princes, incorruptible 
magistrates, mild and gentle masters, and faithful subjects, and 
maintain, in a just harmony, that variety of stations and condi- 
tions, upon which depend the peace and tranquillity of the peo- 
ple, and the safety of empires. 

But, in order to impress more sensibly upon you the illusion 
of this pretext, when you shall be free from embarrassment, 
and disengaged from those external cares which at present detach 
your thoughts from salvation, will yoiu- heart be free from pas- 
sions? Will those iniquitous and invisible bonds which now 
stop you be broken asunder? Will you be restored to your- 
selves ? Will you be more humble, more patient, more moder- 
ate, more virtuous, more mortified? Alas! It is not external 
agitations which check you; it is the disorder within; it is the 
tumultuous ardour of the passions: it is not from the cares 
of fortune, and the embarrassments of events and business, 
says a holy father, that confusion and trouble proceed; it is 
from the irregular desires of the soul; a heart in which God 
reigns is tranquil every where. Your cares for the world are 
only incompatible with salvation because the affections which 
attach you to it are criminal. It is not your stations, but your 
inclinations, which become rocks of destruction to you. Now, 
from these inclinations you will never be able to free your- 
selves with the same facility as from your cares and embarrass- 
ments; they will afterwards be even more lively, more uncon- 
querable than ever: Besides this fund of weakness which they 
draw from your corruption, they will have that force and strength 
acquired by habit through time and years. You think, that, in 
attaining rest, every tiling will be accomplished; and you will 
feel, that your passions, more lively in proportion as they no 
longer find external resources to employ them, will turn all their 
violence against yourselves; and you will then be surprised to 
find, in your own hearts, the same obstacles which at present 
you believe to be only in what surrounds you. This leprosy, if 
I may venture to speak in this manner, is not attached to your 
clothes, to your places, to the walls of your palaces, so that, by 
quitting them, you may rid yourselves of it; it has gained root 



8 



ON SALVATION. [Serm. I. 



in your flesh. It is not by renouncing your cares, therefore, 
that you must labour towards curing yourselves; it is by puri- 
fying yourselves that you must sanctify your cares. Every 
thing is pure to those who are pure, otherwise your wound will 
follow you, even into the leisure of your solitude; like that king 
of Judea mentioned in the book of Kings, who in vain abdi- 
cated his throne, delivered up all the insignia, as well as the 
cares of royalty, into the hands of his son, and withdrew him- 
self into the heart of his palace: he carried with him the le- 
prosy with which the Lord had struck him, and beheld that 
shameful disease pursue him even into his retreat. External 
cares find neither their innocency nor their malignity but in 
our own hearts; and it is ourselves alone who render the occu- 
pations of the world dangerous, as it is ourselves alone who ren- 
der those of heaven insipid and disgusting. 

And behold, my brethren, the last reason why we show so 
little fervour and animation in the affair of our eternal salva- 
tion : it is because we fulfil the duties necessary to accomplish it 
without pleasure, and, as it were, against our will. The slightest 
obligations of piety appear hard to us; whatever we do for heaven 
tires us, exhausts us, displeases us: Prayer confines our mind 
too much; retirement wearies us; holy reading, from the first, 
fatigues the attention ; the intercourse of the upright is languid, 
and has nothing sprightly or amusing in it; in a word, we find 
something, I know not what, of melancholy in virtue, which 
occasions us to fulfil its obligations only as hateful debts, which 
we always discharge with a bad grace, and never till we see 
ourselves forced to it. 

But, in the Jirst place, my brethren, you are unjust in attri- 
buting to virtue what springs from your own corruption; it is 
not piety which is disagreeable, it is your heart which is disor- 
dered; it is not the cup of the Lord which is to be accused of 
bitterness, says a holy father, it is your own taste which is vi- 
tiated. Every thing is bitter to a diseased palate: correct your 
dispositions, and the yoke will appear light to you; restore to 
your heart that taste of which sin has deprived it, and you will 
experience how pleasing the Lord is: Hate the world, and you 
will comprehend how much virtue is amiable. In a word, Jesus 
Christ once become the object of your love, you will then feel 
the truth of every thing I say. 

Do the upright experience those disgusts for pious works 
which you feel? Interrogate them: Demand if they consider 
your condition as the happiest: They will answer, that, in their 
opinion, you appear worthy of compassion; that they are feel- 
. ingly touched for your errors; to see you suffering every thing 
for a world which either despises you, wearies you, or cannot 
render you happy; to see you frequently running after pleasures 
more insipid to you than even the virtue from which you fly: 
They will tell you, that they would not change their pretended 



Serm. I.] 



ON SALVATION. 



9 



melancholy for all the felicities of the earth. Prayer consoles 
them; retirement supports them; holy reading animates them; 
works of piety shed a holy unction through their soul; and 
their happiest days are those which they pass with the Lord. 
It is the heart which decides our pleasures. While you continue 
to love the world, you will find virtue insupportable. 

In the second place, If you wish to know why the yoke of 
Jesus Christ is so hard, and so burdensome to you, it is because 
you carry it too seldom: you give only a few rapid moments to 
the care of your salvation; certain days which you consecrate 
,\> piety; certain religious works of which you sometimes acquit 
yourselves; and, in accomplishing their immediate discharge, 
you experience only the disgusts attending the first efforts; you 
do not leave to grace the time necessary to lighten the weight; 
and you anticipate the comforts and the consolations which it 
never fails to shed upon the sequel. Those myterious animals 
which the Philistines made choice of to carry the ark of the Lord 
beyond their frontiers, emblematic of unbelieving souls little ac- 
customed to bear the yoke of Jesus Christ, bellowed, says the 
Scripture, and seemed to groan under the grandeur of that sacred 
weight: In place of which, the children of Levi, a natural image 
of the upright, accustomed to that holy ministry, made the air 
resound with songs of mirth and thanksgivings, while carrying it 
with majesty, even over the burning sands of the desart. The 
law is not a burden to the upright soul, accustomed to observe it. 
It is the worldly soul alone, little familiarised to the holy rules, 
who groans under a weight so pleasing. When Jesus Christ 
declares that his yoke is light and easy, he commands us, at the 
same time, to bear it every day. The unction is attached to 
the habit and usage of it: The arms of Saul were heavy to Da- 
vid, only because he was not accustomed to them. We must 
familiarise ourselves with virtue, in order to be acquainted with. 
its holy attractions. The pleasures of sinners are only super- 
ficially agreeable; the first moments alone are pleasant; descend 
deeper, and you no longer find but gall and bitterness; and the 
deeper you go, the more will you find the void, the weariness, 
and the satiety that are inseparable from sin. Virtue, on the 
contrary is a hidden manna: in order to taste all its sweetness, 
it is necessary to dig for it; but the more you advance, the 
more do its consolations abound; in proportion as the passions 
are calmed, the path becomes easy; and the more will you ap- 
plaud yourselves for having broken asunder chains which 
weighed you down, and which you no longer bore but with re- 
luctance and secret sorrow. 

Thus, while you confine yourselves to simple essays in virtue, 
you will taste only the repugnances and the bitterness of it; 
and, as you will not possess the fidelity of the upright, you can 
have no right, consequently, to expect their consolations. 

In a word, you perform the duties of piety without inclina- 



10 



ON SALVATION. 



[Serm. L 



tion, not only because you do them too seldom, but because you 
only, as I may say, half perform them. You pray, but it is 
without recollection; you abstain, perhaps, from injuring your 
enemy, but it is without loving him as your brother; you ap- 
proach the holy mysteries, but without bringing there that fer- 
vour which alone can enable you to find in them those ineffable 
comforts which they communicate to the religious soul; you 
sometimes separate yourselves from the world, but you carry 
not with you into retirement the silence of the senses and of the 
passions, without which it is only a melancholy fatigue. In a 
word, you only half carry the yoke. Now, Jesus Christ is no 
divided: That Simon of Cyrene, who bore only a part of the 
cross, was overcome by it, and the soldiers were under the ne- 
cessity of using violence, to force him to continue this melan- 
choly office to the Saviour of the world. The fulness alone of 
the law is consolatory; in proportion as you retrench from it, 
it becomes heavy and irksome; the more you wish to soften it, 
the more it weighs you down. On the contrary, by sometimes 
adding extraneous rigours, you feel the load diminished, as if 
you had applied additional softness. Whence comes this? It is 
that the imperfect observance of the law takes its source from a 
heart which the passions still share. Now, according to the 
word of Jesus Christ, a heart divided, and which nourishes two 
loves, must be a kingdom and a theatre full of trouble and de- 
solation. 

Would you wish a natural image of it, drawn from the holy 
Scriptures? Rebecca, on the point of her delivery of Jacob and 
Esau, suffered the most cruel anguish: The two children 
struggled within her; and, as if worn out by her tortures, she 
intreated of the Lord either death or deliverance. Be not sur- 
prised, said a voice from heaven to her, if your sufferings are 
extreme, and that it costs you so much to become a mother; 
the reason is, you carry two nations in your womb. Such is 
your history, my dear hearers; you are surprised that it costs 
you so much to accomplish a pious work; to bring forth Jesus 
Christ, the new man in your heart. Alas ! the reason is, that 
you still preserve there two loves which are irreconcileabie, Ja- 
cob and Esau, the love of the world and the love of Jesus 
Christ; it is because you carry within you two nations, as I 
may say, who make continual war against each other. If the 
love of Jesus Christ alone possessed your heart, all there would 
be calm and peaceable; but you still nourish iniquitous passions 
in it; you still love the world, the pleasures and distinctions of 
fortune; you cannot endure those who eclipse you; your heart 
is full of jealousies, of animosities, of frivolous desires, of cri- 
minal attachments; and from thence it comes that your sacri- 
fices, like those of Cain, being always imperfect, like his, are 
always gloomy and disagreeable. 

Serve, then, the Lord with all your heart, and you will serve 



Serm. I.] 



ON SALVATION. 



11 



him with joy. Give yourself up to him without reserve, with- 
out retaining the smallest right over your passions. Observe 
the righteousness of the law, in all their fulness, and they 
will shed holy pleasures through your heart: For, thus saith the 
prophet, " The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the 
heart." Think not that the tears of penitence are always bitter 
and gloomy. The mourning is only external; when sincere, 
they have a thousand secret recompenses. The upright soul re- 
sembles the sacred bush; nothing strikes our view but prickles 
and thorns, but you see not the glory of the Lord which dwells 
within it; you see only fastings and bodily sufferings, but you 
perceive not the holy unction which soothes and softens them; 
you see silence, retirement, flight from the world and its plea- 
sures, but you behold not the invisible Comfortor, who replaces, 
with so much usury, the society of men, now become insupport- 
able, since they have begun to taste that of God; you see a 
life apparently gloomy and tiresome, but you are incapable of 
seeing the peace and the joy of that innocence which reigns 
within. It is there that the Father of mercies, and the God of 
all consolation, so liberally sheds his favours; and that the soul, 
unable sometimes to support their fulness and excess, is obliged 
to intreat the Lord to suspend the torrent of his kindness, and 
to measure the abundance of his gifts by the weakness of his 
creature. 

Come yourself, my dear hearer, and make a happy experi- 
ence of it; come, and put the fidelity of your God to the trial; 
it is here he wishes to be tried; come, and prove whether or not 
we render false testimonies to his mercies; if we attract the sin- 
ner by false hopes, and if his gifts are not still more abundant 
than our promises. You have long tried the world; you have 
found it destitute of fidelity; it flattered you with hopes of ac- 
complishing every thing; pleasures, honours, imaginary happi- 
ness; it has deceived you; you are unhappy in it; you have 
never been able to attain a situation answerable to your wishes 
or expectations; come, and see if your God will be more faith- 
ful to you; if only bitterness and disgusts are to be found in his 
service; if he promises more than he bestows; if he is an un- 
grateful, changeable, or capricious master; if his yoke is a cruel 
servitude, or a sweet liberty; if the duties which he exacts from 
us are the punishment of his slaves, or the consolation of his 
children; and if he deceives those who serve him. My God! 
how little wouldst thou be worthy of our hearts, wert thou not 
more amiable, more faithful, and more worthy of being served, 
than this miserable world. 

But, in order to serve him as he wishes to be served, we must 
esteem the glory and the happiness of his service; we must pre- 
fer this happiness to all others, and labour in it with sincerity, 
without reserve, and with a ripe and watchful circumspection; 
for, if it is a common fault to want fervour in the business of 



12 



ON SALVATION. [Serm. I 



our eternal salvation, and to become disgusted with it, it is like- 
wise a much more general one to fail of prudence, and to mistake 
our path towards it. 

Part II. — An enterprise, where the dangers are daily, and mis- 
takes common; where, amongst so many different routes wliich 
appear safe, there is, however, only one true and unerring, and 
the success of which must, nevertheless, decide our eternal des- 
tiny: An enterprise of this nature surely requires uncommon 
exertions; and never had we occasion, in the conduct of any 
other, for so much circumspection and prudence. Now, that 
such is the enterprise of salvation, it would be needless to waste 
time in proving here, and equally so for you to doubt. The 
only object of importance, then, to establish, is, the rules and 
the marks of this prudence which is to guide us in so danger- 
ous and so essential an affair. 

The first rule is, not to determine ourselves by chance amongst 
that multiplicity of ways which mankind pursue; carefully to 
examine all, independent of usages and customs, which may au- 
thorise them; in the affair of our sanation, to give nothing to 
opinion or example. The second is, when we have finally 
determined, to leave nothing to the uncertainty of events, and 
always to prefer safety to danger. 

Such are the common rules of prudence adopted by the children 
of the age, in the pursuit of their pretensions, and their temporal 
expectations. Eternal salvation is the only affair in which they are 
neglected. In the first place, no person examines if his ways are 
sure: nor does he ever require any other pledge of his safety than 
the crowd which he sees marching before him. Secondly, — In 
the doubts which spring up during our proceedings, the party the 
most dangerous to salvation, having always self-love in its fa- 
vour, is always preferred: Two important and common errors 
in the afiair of eternal salvation, which it is necessary to combat 
here. The first rule is, not to determine by chance, and in the 
affair of eternity to give nothing to opinion or example. Indeed, 
the upright is every where represented to us in the holy writ- 
ings, as a judicious and prudent man, who calculates, who com- 
pares, who examines, who discriminates, who tries whatever may 
be the most proper, who does not lightly believe every fancy, 
who carries before him the torch of the law, that his steps may 
be enlightened, and that he may not be in danger of mistaking 
his way. The sinner, on the contrary, is there held out as a 
foolish man, who marches by chance, and who, in the most dan- 
gerous passes, advances forward with confidence, as if he was 
travelling in the straightest and most certain path. 

Now, my brethren, such is the situation of almost all men in 
the affair of salvation. In every other matter, prudent, atten- 
tive, diffident, active to discover any errors concealed under the 
common prejudices; it is in salvation alone that nothing can 



Serm. L] 



ON SALVATION. 



IS 



equal our credulity and imprudence. Yes, my brethren, we tell 
you every day, that the life of the world, which is to say, that 
life of amusement, of inutility, of vanity, x>f show, of effeminacy, 
exempt even from great crimes: that this life, I say, is not a 
Christian one, and consequently is a life of reprobation and in- 
fidelity: It is the doctrine of that religion in which you was 
born; and since your infancy you have been nourished in these 
holy truths. The world, on the contrary, affirms this to be the 
only life which persons of a certain rank can lead; that not to 
conform themselves to it, would betray a barbarity of manners, 
in which there would be more singularity and meanness than 
reason or virtue. 

I even consent that it may still be considered as dubious, 
whether the world or we have reason on our side, and that this 
grand dispute may not yet be decided; nevertheless, as a hor- 
rible alternative depends upon it, and that any mistake here is 
the worst of all evils, it appears that prudence requires us to 
clear it up at least, before we take the final step. It is surely 
natural to hesitate between two contending parties, particularly 
where our salvation is the subject of dispute. Now, I ask you, 
entering into the world, and adopting its manners, its maxims, 
and its customs, as you have adopted them, have you begun by 
examining whether it had reason on its side, and if we were 
wrong and false deceivers? The world wishes you to aspire to 
the favours of fortune, and to neglect neither cares, exertions, 
meannesses, nor artifices to procure them: you follow these 
plans; but have you examined if the gospel does not contradict 
and forbid them? The world boasts of luxury, of magnificence, 
of the delicacies of the table; and in matters of expense, it deems 
nothing excessive but what may tend to derange the circumstan- 
ces. Have you informed yourselves, whether the law of God 
does not prescribe- a more holy use of the riches which we hold 
only from him? The world authorises continual pleasures, 
gaming, theatres; and treats with ridicule whoever dare venture 
even to doubt their innocence. Have you found this decision 
in the sorrowful and crucifying maxims of Jesus Christ? 

The world approves of certain suspicious and odious ways of 
increasing the patrimony of our fathers, and places no other 
bounds to our desires than those of the laws, which punish vio- 
lence and manifest injustice. Can you assure us, that the rules 
of the conscience do not observe more narrowly, and with regard 
to these matters, do not enter into discussions which the world 
is totally unacquainted with? The world has declared, that a 
gentle, effeminate, and idle life, is an innocent life; and that 
virtue is not so rigid and austere as we wish to make it. Be- 
fore giving credit to this, merely upon its assertion, have you 
consulted whether the doctrine brought us by Jesus Christ from 
heaven, subscribed to the novelty and to the danger of these 
maxims? 



14 



ON SALVATION. 



[Seem, f. 



What, my brethren ! in the affair of your eternity, without 
examination or attention, you adopt common prejudices, merely 
because they are established? You blindly follow those who 
march before you, without examining where the path leads to 
which they keep? You even deign not to inquire at yourselves 
whether or not you are deceived? You are satisfied in knowing 
that you are not the only persons mistaken? What! in the 
business which must decide your eternal destiny, you do not 
even make use of your reason? You demand no other pledge 
of your safety than the general error? You have no doubt or 
suspicion? You think it unnecessary to inform yourselves? 
You have no mistrust? All is good, and, in your opinion, as it 
ought to be? You who are so nice, so difficult, so mistrustful, 
so full of precaution when your worldly interests are in question, 
in this grand affair alone you conduct yourselves by instinct, 
by fancy, by foreign impressions? You decide upon nothing, 
but indolently allow yourselves to be dragged away by the mul- 
titude, and the torrent of example? You who, in every other 
matter, would blush to think like the crowd; you who pique 
yourselves upon superiority of genius, and upon leaving to the 
common people, and to weak minds, all vulgar prejudices; you 
who carry to a ridiculous extreme, perhaps, your mode of think- 
ing on every other point, upon salvation alone you think with 
the crowd, and it appears that reason is denied to you on this 
grand interest alone. What, my brethren ! When you are asked, 
in the steps which you take to insure success to your worldly 
expectations, the reasons which have induced you to prefer one 
party to another, you advance such solid and prudent motives; 
you justify your choice by prospects so certain and decisive; 
you appear to have so maturely considered them before adopting 
their execution; and when we demand of you whence it comes, 
that in the affair of your eternal salvation you prefer the abuses, 
the customs, the maxims of the world, to the examples of the 
saints, who certainly did not live like you; and to the rules of 
the gospel, which condemn all those who live as you do; you 
have nothing to answer but that you are not singular, and that 
you must live like the rest of the world. Great God! to what 
purpose are great abilities in the conduct of projects which will 
perish with us ! We have reasons and arguments in support of 
vanity, and we are children with regard to the truth. We pique 
ourselves on our wisdom in the affairs of the world; and, alas! 
in the business of our eternal salvation, we think it no disgrace 
to be ignorant and foolish. 

You will tell us, perhaps, that you are neither wiser, nor 
more able than all the others who live like you; that you can- 
not enter into discussions which are beyond your reach; that, 
were we to be believed, it would be necessary to cavil at and 
dispute every thing; and that piety does not consist in refining 
to such an extreme. But I ask you,-— Is so much subtilty re- 



Serm. I.] ON SALVATION. 



15 



quired to know that the world is a deceitful guide; that its 
maxims are rejected in the school of Jesus Christ; and that its 
customs can never subvert the law of God? Is not this the 
most simple and the most common rule of the gospel, and the 
first truth in the plan of salvation? To know our duty, it re- 
quires only to walk in simplicity of heart. Subiilties are only 
necessary in order to dissemble with ourselves, and to connect, 
if possible, the passions with the holy rules; there it is that the 
human mind has occasion for all its industry, for the task is 
difficult. Such is exactly your case; you who pretend, that to 
recal customs to the law is a ridiculous refinement. To know 
our duty, it only requires a conference with ourselves. While 
Saul continued faithful, he had no occasion to consult the sor- 
ceress with regard to what he should do; the law of God suffi- 
ciently instructed him. It was only after his guilt, that, in 
order to calm the inquietudes of a troubled conscience, and to 
connect his criminal weaknesses with the law of God, he be- 
thought himself of seeking, in the answers of a deceitful oracle, 
some authority favourable to his passions. Love the truth, and 
you will soon acquire a knowledge of it. A clear conscience is 
the best of all instructors. 

Not that I wish to blame those sincere researches which an 
honest and timid soul makes to enlighten and instruct itself; I 
wish only to say, that the majority of doubts with regard to our 
duties, in those hearts delivered up like you to the world, springs 
from a riding principle of cupidity, which, on the other side, 
would wish not to interfere with its infamous passions; and, on 
the other, have the authority of the law to protect it from the 
remorses which attend a manifest transgression. For, be- 
sides, if you seek the Lord in sincerity, and your lights are in- 
sufficient, there are still prophets in Israel; consult, in proper 
time, those who preserve the form of the law, and of the holy 
doctrine, and who teach the way of God in truth. Do not pro- 
pose your doubts with those colourings and softenings which 
always fix the decision in your favour; do not apply in order to 
be deceived, but to be instructed; seek not favourable, but sure 
and enlightened guides; do not content yourselves even with 
the testimony of men; consult the Lord frequently, and through 
different channels. The voice of heaven is uniform, because 
the voice of truth, of which it is the interpreter, is the same. 
If the testimonies do not accord, prefer always what places you 
farthest from danger; always mistrust the opinion which pleases, 
and which already had the suffrage of your self-love. It rarely 
happens that the decisions of our inclinations are found the 
same with those of the holy rules; nevertheless, it is that which 
decides on all our preferences in the business of salvation. — Se- 
cond step of our imprudence in the affair of our eternal salva- 
tion. — In effect, there is scarcely a doubt with regard to our 
duties, which conceals from us the precise obligation of the law 



16 



ON SALVATION. 



[Serm. I. 



on every step. We know the paths by which Jesus Christ and 
the saints have passed; they are still pointed out to us every 
day; we are invited, by the success which they have had, to 
walk in their steps. In this manner, say they to us, with the 
apostles, did those men of God who have preceded us overcome 
the world and obtain the performance of the promises. We see, 
that, by imitating them, we may hope for all, and, in the way in 
which we walk, that every thing is to be dreaded. Ought we 
to hesitate on this alternative? Nevertheless, in every thing we 
resist our own lights; everywhere we prefer danger to safety; 
our whole life is, indeed, one continued danger; in all our ac- 
tions we float, not between the more or less perfect, but between 
guilt and simple errors. Every time we act, the question is not 
to know whether we are doing the greatest good, but if we are 
committing only a slight fault, worthy of indulgence. All our 
duties are limited to the inquiry at ourselves, if possessing such 
principles; if, to a certain degree, delivering ourselves up to re- 
sentment; if employing a certain degree of duplicity; if not de- 
nying ourselves a certain gratification, be a crime, or a venial 
fault; you always hang betwixt these two destimes; and your 
conscience can never render you the testimony that on any oc- 
casion you made choice of the part in which there was no 
danger. 

Thus, you know, that a life of pleasure, of gaming, of show, 
of amusement, when even nothing gross or criminal is mingled 
with it, is a part very doubtful for eternity; no saint, at least, 
has left you such an example. You are sensible, that more 
guarded and more Christian manners would leave you nothing 
similar to dread; nevertheless, you love an accommodating 
doubt better than an irksome safety; you know that grace 
has moments which never return: that nothing is more un- 
certain than the return of holy impulses, once rejected; that 
salvation deferred almost always fails; and that to begin to-day 
is prudently assuring ourselves of success: You know it; yet 
you prefer the uncertain hope of a grace to come to the present 
salvation which offers itself to you. Now, my brethren, I only 
demand of you two reflections, and I shall finish. In the first 
place, when, even in this path which you tread, the balance 
were equal, that is to say, when it were equally suspicious whe- 
ther you are to be saved or lost, did the smallest portion of 
faith remain to you, you would be plunged in the most cruel 
alarms; it ought to appear horrible to you that your eternal 
salvation was become a problem, upon which you knew not 
what to decide, and upon which, with equal appearances of 
truth, you might determine for the happiness or the misery of 
your everlasting lot, in the same manner as upon those indiffer- 
ent questions which God has yielded up to the controversies of 
men. You ought to undertake every thing, and to employ 
every exertion, to place appearances, at least, in your favour, 



Serm. L] 



ON SALVATION. 



and to find out a situation where prejudices would be on your 
side: And here, where every thing concludes against you, — 
where the law is unfavourable, — where you have nothing in 
your favour but some fallacious appearances of reason, upon 
which you would not hazard the smallest of your temporal in- 
terests, — and with manners, which to this period have saved 
none, and in which you only strengthen and comfort your- 
selves by the example of those who perish with you,- — you are 
tranquil in this path; you admit of and acknowledge the wisdom 
of those who have chosen a more certain one : you say that they 
are praise- worthy; that they are happy who can assume such a 
command over themselves; that it is much safer to live as they 
do; you say this, and you think it needless to imitate or follow 
their example? Madmam ! cries the apostle, what delusion is it 
which blinds thee? and wherefore dost thou not obey that truth 
which thou knowest? Ah! my brethren, in a choice which in- 
terests our glory, our advancement, our temporal interests, are we 
capable of such imprudence? Of all the various ways which pre- 
sent themselves to ambition, do we leave those where every ap- 
pearance seems favourable to our success, and make choice of 
such as lead to nothing; where fortune is tardy and doubtful; 
and which have hitherto been only productive of misfortune? 
Of salvation, alone, therefore, we make a kind of speculation, 
if I may venture to speak in this manner; that is to say, an 
undertaking without arrangement, without precaution, which 
we abandon to the uncertainty of events, and of which the suc- 
cess can alone be expected from chance, and not from our ex- 
ertions. In a word, as my last reflection, allow me to ask, Why 
you search for, and allege to us so many specious reasons, as a 
justification to yourselves of the manners in which you live? 
Either you wish to be saved, or you are determined to be lost. 
Do you wish to be saved ! Choose then, the most proper means 
of attaining what you aspire to. Quit those doubtful paths, by 
which none have hitherto been conducted to it; confine your- 
selves to that which Jesus Christ has pointed out to us, and 
which alone can safely lead us to it; do not apply yourselves 
to lessen in your own sight the dangers of your situation, and 
to view them in the most favourable light, in order to dread 
them less; rather magnify the danger to your mind: we cannot 
dread too much what we cannot shun too much; and sal- 
vation is the only concern where precaution can never be 
excessive, because a mistake in it is without remedy. See 
if those who once followed the same deceitful paths in which 
you tread, and who employed the same reasons that you 
make use of for their justification, have confined themselves 
to them from the moment that grace had operated in their 
hearts serious and sincere desires of salvation: They regarded 
the dangers in which you live as incompatible with their design; 
they sought more solid and certain paths : they made the holy 

B 



13 



ON SALVATION. 



[Serm. L 



safety of retirement succeed to the inutility and the dangers of 
society; the habit of prayer to the dissipation of gaming and 
amusements; the guard of the senses to the indecency of dress, 
and the danger of public spectacles; Christian mortification to 
the softness of an effeminate and sensual life; the gospel to the 
world: they comprehended that it would be absurd to wish 
their salvation through the same means by which others are 
lost. But, if you are determined to perish, alas ! why wall you 
still preserve measures with religion? Why will you always 
seek to place some specious reasons on your side, to conciliate 
your manners with the gospel, and to preserve, as I may say, 
appearances still with Jesus Christ? Why are you only half- 
sinners, and still leave to your grossest passions the useless 
check of the law? Cast off the remains of that yoke which is 
irksome to you; and which, in lessening your pleasures, lessens 
not your punishment. Why do you accomplish your perdition 
with so much constraint? In place of those scruples, which 
permit you only doubtfid gains, and deny you still certain low, 
and manifestly wicked profits, but which place you in the num- 
ber of those reprobates who shall never possess the kingdom of 
God; overleap those bounds, and no longer place any limits to 
your guilt, but those of your cupidity; in place of those loose 
and worldly manners, which will equally prove your ruin, re- 
fuse nothing to your passions, and, like the beasts of the earth, 
yield to the gratification of every desire. Yes, sinners, perish 
with all the fruits of iniquity, seeing you will equally reap tears 
and eternal punishment. 

But, no, my dear hearer, we only give you these counsels of 
despair, in order to inspire you with a just horror at them; it 
is a tender artifice of zeal, which only assumes the appearance 
of exhorting you to destruction, that you may not consent your- 
selves; alas! follow rather those remains of light, which still 
point out the truth to you at a distance. It is not without rea- 
son that the Lord has hitherto preserved within you these seeds 
of salvation, and has not permitted all, even to the principles, 
to be blotted out; it is a claim which he still preserves to your 
heart: take care only? that you found not upon this, the vain 
hope of a future conversion; we are not permitted to hope, till 
we have begun to labour. Begin, then, the grand work of your 
eternal salvation, for which alone the Almighty has placed you 
upon the earth; and on which you have never as yet be- 
stowed even a thought. Esteem so important a care; prefer it 
to all others; find your only pleasures in applying to it; exa- 
mine the surest and most proper means to succeed, and fix up- 
on them, whatever they cost, from the moment you have found 
them out. 

Such is the prudence of the gospel, so often recommended by 
Jesus Christ; beyond that all is vanity and error. You may 
possess a superior mind, capable of every exertion, and rare and 



Serm. II.] ON THE SMALL NUMBER, &c. 



19 



shining talents; if you err with regard to your eternal salva- 
tion, you are a child. Solomon, so esteemed in the East for 
his wisdom, is a madman, whose folly we can now with diffi- 
culty comprehend. All worldly reason is but a mockery, a 
dazzling of the senses, if it mistakes the decisive point of eter- 
nity. There is nothing important in life but this single object; 
all the rest is a dream, in which any mistake is of little con- 
sequence. Trust not yourselves, therefore, to the multitude, 
which is the party of those who err; take not as guides men 
who can never be your sureties; leave nothing to chance, or to 
the uncertainty of events ; it is the height of folly where eterni- 
ty is concerned; remember that there is an infinity of paths, 
which appear light to men, yet, nevertheless, conduct to death; 
that almost all who perish do it in the belief that they are in 
the way of salvation; and that all reprobates, at the last day, 
when they shall hear their sentence pronounced, will be sur- 
prised, says the gospel, at their condemnation; because they 
all expected the inheritance of the just. It is thus, that, after 
having waited for it in this life, according to the rules of faith, 
you will for ever enjoy it in heaven. Now to God, &c. 



SERMON II. 
ON THE SMALL NUMBER OF THE SAVED. 
Luke iv, 27. 

And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and 
none of them were cleansed saving Naaman the Syrian. 

Every day, my brethren, you continue to demand of us, if the 
road to heaven is really so difficult, and the number of the saved 
is indeed so small as we say ! To a question so often proposed, 
and still oftener resolved, our Saviour answers you at present, 
that there were many widows in Israel afflicted with famine; 
but the widow of Sarepta was alone found worthy the succour 
of the prophet Elias : that the number of lepers was great in 
Israel in the time of the prophet Eliseus; and that Naaman was 
the only one cured by the man of God. 

Were I here, my brethren, for the purpose of alarming, ra- 
ther than instructing you, I needed only to recapitulate what in 
the holy writings we find dreadful with regard to this great 
truth; and running over the history of the just, from age to age, 
to show you, that, in all times, the number of the saved has been 
very small. The family of Noah alone saved from the general 



20 



ON THE SMALL NUMBER [Serm. II. 



flood: Abraham chosen from amongst men to be the sole depo- 
sitary of the covenant with God; Joshua and Caleb the only two 
of six hundred thousand Hebrews who saw the land of promise; 
Job the only upright man in the land of Uz, — Lot, in Sodom. 
To representations so alarming would have succeeded the say- 
ings of the prophets. In Isaiah you would see the elect are rare 
as the grapes which are found after the vintage, and have 
escaped the search of the gatherer; as rare as the blades which 
remain by chance in the field, and have escaped the scythe of 
the mower. The Evangelist would still have added new traits 
to the terrors of these images. I might have spoken to you of 
two roads — of which one is narrow, rugged, and the path of a 
very small number; the other broad, open, and strewed with 
flowers, and almost the general path of men: That every where, 
in the holy writings, the multitude is always spoken of as form- 
ing the party of the reprobate: while the saved, compared with 
the rest of mankind, form only a small flock, scarcely percep- 
tible to the sight. I would have left you in fears with regard 
to your salvation; always cruel to those who have not renounced 
faith and every hope of being amongst the saved. But what 
would it serve to limit the fruits of this instruction to the single 
point of proving how few persons are saved? Alas ! I would 
make the danger known, without instructing you how to avoid 
it : I would show you, with the prophet, the sword of the wrath 
of God suspended over your heads, without assisting you to es- 
cape the threatened blow: I would alarm the conscience, with- 
out instructing the sinner. 

My intention is therefore to-day, in our morals and manner 
of life, to search for the cause of this number being so small. 
As every one flatters himself he will not be excluded, it is of 
importance to examine if his confidence be well founded. I wish 
not, in marking to you the causes which render salvation so rare, 
to make you generally conclude, that few will be saved; but to 
bring you to ask of yourselves, if, living as you live, you can 
hope to be so. Who am I? What is it I do for heaven; and 
what can be my hopes in eternity? I propose no other order, in 
a matter of such importance. What are the causes which ren- 
der salvation so rare? I mean to point out three principal ones, 
which is the only arrangement of this discom*se. Art and far- 
sought reasonings would here be ill-timed. O attend, therefore, 
be whom you may ! No subject can be more worthy your at- 
tention, since it goes to inform you what may be the hopes of 
your eternal destiny. 

Part I. — Few are saved; because in that number we can 
only comprehend two descriptions of persons; either those who 
have been so happy as to preserve their innocence pure and un- 
defiled; or those who, after having lost, have regained it by pe- 
nitence:— First cause. There are only these two ways of salva- 



Serm. II.] OF THE SAVED. 



21 



tion; and heaven is only open to the innocent or the penitent. 
Now, of which party are you? Are you innocent? Are 
you penitent? 

Nothing unclean shall enter the kingdom of God. We must 
consequently carry there, either an innocence unsullied, or an 
innocence regained. Now, to die innocent, is a grace to which 
few souls can aspire; and to live penitent, is a mercy, which 
the relaxed state of our morals renders equally rare. Who in- 
deed will pretend to salvation, by the claim of innocence? 
Where are the pure souls in whom sin has never dwelt: and 
who have preserved to the end the sacred treasure of grace con- 
fided to them by baptism, and which our Saviour will re-de- 
mand at the awful day of punishment? 

In those happy days, when the whole church was still but an 
assembly of saints, it was very uncommon to find an instance 
of a believer, who, after having received the gifts of the Holy 
Spirit, and acknowledged Jesus Christ in the sacrament, which 
regenerates us, fell back to his former irregularities of life. 
Ananias and Sapphira were the only prevaricators in the church 
of Jerusalem; that of Corinth had only one incestuous sinner. 
Church-penitence was then a remedy almost unknown; and 
scarcely was there found among these true Israelites one single 
leper, whom they were obliged to drive from the holy altar and 
separate from communion with his brethren. But, since that 
time, the number of the upright diminishes, in proportion as 
that of believers increases. It would appear, that the world, 
pretending now to have become almost generally Christian, has 
brought with it into the church its corruptions and its maxims. 
Alas! we all go astray, almost from the breast of our mo- 
thers! The first use which we make of our heart is a crime; 
our first desires are passions; and our reason only expands and 
increases on the wrecks of our innocence. The earth, says a 
prophet, is infected by the corruption of those who inhabit it : 
All have violated the laws, changed the ordinances, and broken 
the alliance which should have endured for ever : All commit 
sin; and scarcely is there one to be found who does the work of 
the Lord. Injustice, calumny, lying, treachery, adultery, and 
the blackest crimes, have deluded the earth. The brother lays 
snares for his brother; the father is divided from his children; 
the husband from his wife : There is no tie which a vile interest 
does not dissolve: Good faith and probity are no longer virtues 
but among the simple people; animosities are endless; recon- 
ciliations feints ; and never is a] former enemy regarded as a 
brother: They tear, they devour each other. Assemblies are 
no longer but for the purpose of public and general censure. 
The purest virtue is no longer a protection from the malignity 
of tongues. Gaming is become either a trade, a fraud, or a 
fury. Repasts, those innocent ties of society, degenerate into 
excesses, of which we dare not speak. Our age witnesses hor- 



22 



ON THE SMALL NUMBER [Serm. II. 



rors, with which our forefathers were unacquainted. Behold, 
then, already one path of salvation shut to the generality of 
men. All have erred. Be whom ye may, who listen to me 
at present, the time has been when sin reigned over you: Age 
may perhaps have calmed your passions; but what was your 
youth? Long and habitual infirmities may perhaps have dis- 
gusted you with the world: but what use did you formerly make 
of the vigour of health? A sudden inspiration of grace may 
have turned your heart; but do you not most fervently intreat, 
that every moment prior to that inspiration may be effaced from 
the remembrance of the Lord? 

But with what am I taking up my time? We are all sinners, 
O my God ! And thou knowest our hearts : What we know of 
our errors, is perhaps in thy sight the most pardonable; and 
we all allow, that by innocence we have no claim to salvation. 
There remains, therefore, only one resource, which is penitence. 
After our shipwreck, say the saints, it is the happy plank which 
alone can conduct us into port; there is no other mean of sal- 
vation for us. Be whom you may, prince or subject, great or 
low, penitence alone can save you. Now, permit me to ask, — 
Where are the penitent? You will find more, says a holy fa- 
ther, who have never fallen, than who, after their fall, have 
raised themselves by true repentance. This is a terrible saying; 
but do not let us carry things too far: the truth is sufficiently 
dreadful, without adding new terrors to it by vain declamation. 

Let us only examine if the majority of us have a right, through 
penitence, to salvation. What is a penitent? According to 
Tertullian, a penitent is a believer, who feels every moment the 
unhappiness which he formerly had, to forget and lose his God; 
who has his guilt incessantly before his eyes; who finds every- 
where the traces and remembrance of it. 

A penitent is a man, intrusted by God with judgment against 
himself; who refuses himself the most innocent pleasures, be- 
cause he had formerly indulged in the most criminal; who puts 
up with the most necessary ones with pain; who now regards 
his body as an enemy, whom it is necessary to conquer; as an 
unclean vessel which must be purified; as an unfaithful debtor, 
of whom it is proper to exact to the last farthing. A penitent 
regards himself as a criminal condemned to death, because he 
no longer is worthy of life. In the loss of riches or health, he 
sees only a privation of favours that he had formerly abused; in 
the humiliations which happen to him, but the pains of his guilt; 
in the agonies with which he is racked, but the commencement 
of those punishments he has justly merited: such is a penitent. 
But I again ask you, — WTiere amongst us are penitents of this 
description? Now look around you. I do not tell you to judge 
your brethren, but to examine what are the manners and morals 
of those who surround you; nor do I speak of those open and avow- 
ed sinners, who have thrown off even the appearance of virtue; 



Serm. II.] OF THE SAVED. 



23 



I speak only of those who, like yourselves, live like the gene- 
rality, and whose actions present nothing to the public view 
particularly shameful or depraved. They are sinners, and they 
admit of it: You are not innocent, and you confess it yourselves. 
Now, are they penitent; or are you? Age, avocations, more 
serious employments, may perhaps have checked the sallies of 
youth: Even the bitterness which the Almighty has made at- 
tendant on our passions; the deceits, the treacheries of the 
world; an injured fortune, which a ruined constitution, may 
have cooled the ardour, and confined the regular desires of 
your heart: Crimes may have disgusted you even with crimes; 
for passions gradually extinguish themselves. Time, and the 
natural inconstancy of the heart, will bring these about; yet 
nevertheless, though detached from sin by incapability, you are 
no nearer your God. According to the world, your are become 
more prudent, more regular, more what it calls men of probity; 
more exact in fulfilling your public or private duties; but you 
are not penitent. You have ceased from your disorders, but 
you have not expiated them: You are not converted; this great 
stroke, this grand change of the heart, which regenerates man, has 
not yet been felt by you. Nevertheless this situation, so truly 
dangerous, does not alarm you: Sins, which have never been 
washed away by sincere repentance, and consequently never ob- 
literated from the book of life, appear in your eyes as no longer 
existing; and you will tranquilly leave this world in a state 
of impenitence, so much the more dangerous, as you will die 
without being sensible of your danger. What I say here, is 
not merely a rash expression, or an emotion of zeal; nothing 
is more real, or more exactly true: It is the situation of almost 
all men, even the wisest and most esteemed by the world. 

The morality of the younger stages in life is always lax, if 
not licentious, Age, disgust, and establishments for life, fix 
the heart and withdraw it from debauchery: but where are 
those who are converted? Where are those who expiate their 
crimes by tears of sorrow and true repentance? Where are 
those who, having begun as sinners, end as penitents? Show 
me, in your manner of living, the smallest trace of penitence. 
Are your graspings at wealth and power, your anxieties to at- 
tain the favour of the great, (and by these means an increase of 
employments and influence,) are these proofs of it? Would you 
wish to reckon even your crimes as virtues? That the suffer- 
ings of your ambition, pride, and avarice, should discharge you 
from an obligation which they themselves have imposed? You 
are penitent to the world, but are you so to Jesus Christ? The 
infirmities with which God inflicts you; the enemies he raises 
up against you; the disgraces and losses with which he tries 
you; do you receive them all as you ought, with humble submis- 
sion to his will, and, far from finding in them occasions of pe- 
nitence, do you not turn them into the objects of new crimes? 



24 ON THE SMALL NUMBER [Serm. II. 



It is the duty of an innocent soul to receive with submission 
the chastisements of the Almighty; to discharge, with courage, 
the painful duties of the station allotted to him, and to be faith- 
ful to the laws of the gospel; but do sinners owe nothing bevond 
this? And yet they pretend to salvation; but upon what claim? 
To say that you are innocent before God, your own conscience 
will bear testimony against you. To endeavour to persuade 
yourselves that you are penitent, you dare not; and you would 
condemn yourselves through your own mouths. Upon what, 
then, dost thou depend, O man! who thus livest so tranquil? 

And what renders it still more dreadful is, that, acting in 
this manner, you only follow the torrent : Your morals are the 
morals of almost all men. You may, perhaps, be acquainted 
with some still more guilty, (for I suppose you to have still re- 
maining some sentiments of religion, and regard for your sal- 
vation); but do you know any real penitents? I am afraid we 
must search the deserts and solitudes for them. You can 
scarcely particularise, among persons of rank and usage of the 
world, a small number whose morals and mode of life, more 
austere and more guarded than the generality, attract the atten- 
tion, and very likely the censure of the public: All the rest 
walk in the same path. I see clearly that every one comforts 
himself by the example of his neighbour : That, in that point, 
children succeed to the false security of their fathers; that none 
live innocent; that none die penitent: I see it; and I cry, O 
God! if thou hast not deceived us; if all thou hast told as with 
regard to the road to eternal life, shall be fulfilled to a point: if 
the number of those who must perish shall not influence thee 
to abate from the severity of thy laws, what will become of that 
immense multitude of creatures which every hour disappears 
from the face of the earth? Where are our friends, our rela- 
tions, who have gone before us, and what is their lot in the 
eternal regions of death? What shall we ourselves be one day? 
When formerly a prophet complained to the Lord, that all Israel 
had forsaken his protection, he replied, that seven thousand still 
remained who had not bowed the knee to Baal: Behold the 
number of pure and faithful souls which a whole kingdom then 
contained ! But couldest thou still, O my God ! comfort the an- 
guish of thy servants to-day by the same assurance? I know 
that thin ft eye discerns still some upright amongst us; that the 
priesthood has still its Phin eases; the magistracy its Samuels : 
the sword its Joshuas; the court its Daniels, its Esthers, and 
its Davids: for the world only exists for thy chosen; and all 
would perish were the number accomplished: But those happy 
remains of the children of Israel who shall inherit salvation, 
what are they, compared to the grains of sand in the sea; I 
mean, to that number of sinners who combat for their own des- 
truction? You come after this, my brethren, to inquire if it be 



Serm. IL] OF THE SAVED. 



25 



true, that few shall be saved? Thou hast said it, O my God! 
and consequently it is a truth which shall endure for ever. 

But, even admitting that the Almighty had not spoken thus, 
I would wish, in the second place, to review, for an instant, 
what passes among men: — the laws by which they are governed; 
the maxims by which the multitude is regulated: This is the 
second cause of the paucity of the saved; and, properly speak- 
ing, is only a developement of the first, — the force of habit and 
customs. 

Part II. — Few people are saved, because the maxims most 
universally received in all countries, and upon which depend, 
in general, the morals of the multitude, are incompatible with 
salvation. The rules laid down, approved, and authorised by 
the world, with regard to the application of wealth, the love of 
glory, Christian moderation, and the duties of offices and condi- 
tions, are diametrically opposite to those of the evangelists, and 
consequently can lead only to death. I shall not, at present, 
enter into a detail too extended for a discourse, and too little 
serious, perhaps, for Christians. 

I need not tell you, that it is an established custom in the 
world, to allow the liberty of proportioning expenses to rank 
and wealth; and, provided it is a patrimony we inherit from our 
ancestors, we may distinguish ourselves by the use of it, with- 
out restraint to our luxury, or without regard, in our profusion, 
to any thing but our pride and caprice. 

But Christian moderation has its rules. We are not the ab- 
solute masters of our riches; nor are we entitled to abuse what 
the Almighty has bestowed upon us for better purposes. Above 
all, while thousands of unfortunate wretches languish in poverty, 
whatever we make use of beyond the wants and necessary ex- 
penses of our station, is an inhmnanity to, and a theft from 
the poor. These are refinements of devotion, say they; and, 
in matters of expense and profusion, nothing is excessive or 
blameable, according to the world, but what may tend to de- 
range the fortune. I need not tell you, that it is an approved 
custom, to decide our lots, and to regulate our choice of profes- 
sions or situations in life, by the order of our birth, or the inte- 
rests of fortune. But, O my God ! does the ministry of thy 
gospel derive its source from the worldly considerations of a 
carnal birth? We cannot establish all, says the world, and it 
would be melancholy to see persons of rank and birth in avoca- 
tions unworthy of their dignity. If born to a name distinguished 
in the world, you must get forward by dint of intrigue, mean- 
ness, and expense: Make fortune your idol. That ambition, 
however much condemned by the laws of the gospel, is only a 
sentiment worthy of your name and birth. 

You are of a sex and rank which introduce you to the gaieties 
of the world: You cannot but do as others do: You must frc- 



26 



ON THE SMALL NUMBER [Serm. II. 



quent all the public places, where those of your age and rank 
assemble; enter into the same pleasures; pass your days in the 
same frivolities; and expose yourself to the same clangers: These 
are the received maxims; and you are not made to reform them. 
Such is the doctrine of the world. 

Now, permit me to ask you here, Who confirms you in these 
ways? By what rule are they justified to your mind? Who 
authorises you in this dissipation, which is neither agreeable to 
the title you have received by baptism, nor perhaps to those you 
hold from your ancestors? Wbo authorises those public plea- 
sures, which you only think innocent, because your soul, already 
too familiarised with sin, feels no longer the dangerous impres- 
sions or tendency of them? Who authorises you to lead an ef- 
feminate and sensual life, without virtue, sufferance, or any re- 
ligious exercise? To live like a stranger in the midst of your 
own family, disdaining to inform yourself with regard to the 
morals of those dependent upon you! Through an affected 
state, to be ignorant whether they believe in the same God; 
whether they fulfil the duties of the religion you profess? Who 
authorises you in maxims so little Christian? Is it the gospel 
of Jesus Christ. Is it the doctrine of the apostles and saints? 
For surely some rule is necessary to assure us that we are in 
safety. What is yours? Custom: That is the only reply you 
can make. We see none around us, but what conduct them- 
selves in the same way, and by the same rule. Entering into 
the world, we find the manners already established: Our fathers 
lived thus, and from them we copy our customs; The wisest 
conform to them: An individual cannot be wiser than the whole 
world, and must not pretend to make himself singular, by act- 
ting contrary to the general voice. Such, my brethren, are your 
only comforters against all the terrors of religion. None act 
up to the law. The public example is the only guarantee of 
our morals. We never reflect, that, as the Holy Spirit says, 
the laws of the people are vain: That our Saviour has left us 
rules, in which neither times, ages, nor customs, can ever au- 
thorise the smallest change: That the heavens and the earth 
shall pass away; that customs and manners shall change; but 
that the divine laws will eA r erlastingly be the same. 

We content ourselves with looking around us. We do not 
reflect, that what at present we call custom, would, in former 
times, before the morals of Christians became degenerated, have 
been regarded as monstrous singularities; and, if corruption has 
gained since that period, these vices, though they have lost their 
singularity, have not lost their guilt. We do not reflect, that 
we shall be judged by the gospel, and not by custom; by the 
examples of the holy, and not by men's opinions; that the ha- 
bits, which are only established among believers by the relaxa- 
tion of faith, are abuses we are to lament, not examples we are 
to follow: That in changing, the manners, they have not changed 



Serm. II.] OF THE SAVED. 



our duties: That the common and general example which au- 
thorises them, only proves that virtue is rare, but not that pro- 
fligacy is permitted. In a word, that piety and a real Christian 
life are too unpalatable to our depraved nature ever to be prac- 
tised by the majority of men. Come now and say, that you 
only do as others do. It is exactly by that you condemn your- 
selves. What ! the most terrible certainty of your condemna- 
tion shall become the only motive for your confidence ! Which, 
according to the scriptures, is the road that conducts to death? 
Is it not that which the majority pursues? Which is the party 
of the reprobate? Is it not the multitude? You do nothing 
but what others do. But thus, in the time of Noah, perished 
all who were buried under the waters of the deluge: All who, 
in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, prostrated themselves before the 
golden calf: All who, in the time of Elijah, bowed the knee to 
Baal: All who, in the time of Eleazar, abandoned the law of 
their fathers. You only do what others do; but that is exactly 
what the Scriptures forbid: Do not, say they, conform your- 
selves to this corrupted age. Now, the corrupted age means 
not the small number of the just, whom you endeavour not to 
imitate; it means the multitude whom you follow. You only 
do what others do; you will consequently experience the same 
lot. Now, " Misery to thee, (cried formerly St. Augustin), fatal 
torrent of human customs; wilt thou never suspend thy course? 
To the end wilt thou drag in the children of Adam to thine 
immense and terrible abyss?" 

In place of saying to ourselves, " What are my hopes? In 
the church of Jesus Christ there are two roads; one broad and 
open, by which almost the whole world passes, and which leads 
to death; the other narrow, where few indeed enter, and which 
conducts to life eternal; in which of these am I? Are my mo- 
rals the usual ones of persons of my rank, age, and situation in 
life? Am I with the great number? Then I am not in the 
right path. I am losing myself. The great number in every 
station is not the party saved." Far from reasoning in this 
manner, we say to ourselves, " I am not in a worse state than 
others; those of my rank and age live as I do: Why should I 
not live like them? Why, my dear hearers? For that very 
reason: The general mode of living cannot be that of a Chris- 
tian life. In all ages, the holy have been remarkable and sin- 
gular men. Their manners were always different from those of 
the world; and they have only been saints because their lives 
had no similarity to those of the rest of mankind. In the time 
of Esdras, in spite of the defence against it, the custom prevail- 
ed of intermarrying with stranger women: This abuse became 
general: The priests and the people no longer made any scruple 
of it. But what did this holy restorer of the law : did he fol- 
low the example of his brethren? Did he believe, that guilt, in 
becoming general, became more legitimate? No. He recalled 



28 



ON THE SMALL NUMBER [Serm. II. 



the people to a sense of the abuse. He took the book of the law 
in his hand, and explained it to the affrighted people, — corrected 
the custom by the truth. Follow, from age to age, the history 
of the just; and see if Lot conformed himself to the habits of 
Sodom, or if nothing distinguished him from the other inhabi- 
tants : If Abraham lived like the rest of his age : If Job re- 
sembled the other princes of his nation: If Esther conducted 
herself, in the court of Ahasuerus, like the other women of that 
prince: If many widows in Israel resembled Judith: If, among 
the children of the captivity, it is not said of Tobias alone that 
he copied not the conduct of his brethren; and that he even 
fled from the danger of their commerce and society. See, if in 
those happy ages, when Christians were all saints, they did not 
shine like stars in the midst of the corrupted nations; and if 
they served not as a spectacle to angels and men, by the singu- 
larity of their lives and manners: If the Pagans did not re- 
proach them for their retirement, and shunning of all public 
theatres, places, and pleasures: If they did not complain that 
the Christians affected to distinguish themselves in every thing 
from their fellow-citizens; to form a separate people in the 
midst of the people; to have their particular laws and customs; 
and if a man from their side embraced the party of the Chris- 
tians, they did not consider him as for ever lost to their plea- 
sures, assemblies, and customs: In a word, see, if in all ages 
the saints whose lives and actions have been transmitted down 
to us, have resembled the rest of mankind. 

You will perhaps tell us, that all these are singularities and 
exceptions, rather than rules which the world is obliged to fol- 
low. They are exceptions, it is true: but the reason is, that 
the general rule is to throw away salvation; that a religious and 
pious soul in the midst of the world, is always a singularity ap- 
proaching to a miracle. The whole world, you say, is not 
obliged to follow these examples; but is not piety the general 
duty of all? To be saved, must we not be holy? Must heaven, 
with difficulty and sufferance, be gained by some, while with 
ease by others? Have you any other gospel to follow; other 
duties to fulfil; other promises to hope for, than those of the 
Holy Bible? Ah! since there was another way more easy to 
arrive at salvation, wherefore, ye pious Christians, who at this 
moment enjoy in heaven, that kingdom, gained with toil, and 
at the expense of your blood, did ye leave us examples so dan- 
gerous and useless? 

Wherefore have ye opened for us a road, rugged, disagree- 
able, and calculated to repress our ardour, seeing there was an- 
other you could have pointed out, more easy, and more likely to 
attract us, by facilitating our progress? Great God! how little 
does mankind consult reason in the point of eternal salvation ! 

Will you console yourselves, after this, with the multitude, as 
if the greatness of the number could render the guilt unpunish- 



Serm. IL] OF THE SAVED. 



29 



ed, and the Almighty durst not condemn all those who live like 
you? But what are all creatures in the sight of God? Did the 
multitude of the guilty prevent him from destroying all flesh at 
the deluge? from making fire from heaven descend upon the 
five iniquitous cities? from burying, in the waters of the Red 
Sea, Pharoah and all his army ? from striking with death all 
who murmured in the desert? Ah ! the kings of the earth may 
have regard to the number of the guilty, because the punish- 
ment becomes impossible, or at least dangerous, when the fault 
is become general. But God, who wipes the impious, says Job, 
from off the face of the earth, as one wipes the dust from off a 
garment; God, in whose sight all people and nations are as if 
they were not, numbers not the guilty: He has regard only to 
the crimes; and all that the weak and miserable sinner can ex- 
pect from his unhappy accomplices is to have them as com- 
panions in his misery. So few are saved; because the maxims 
most universally adopted are maxims of sin: So few are saved, 
because the maxims and duties most universally unknown, or 
rejected, are those most indispensable to salvation. Last reflec- 
tion, which is indeed nothing more than the proof, and the ex- 
planation of the former ones. 

What are the engagements of the holy vocation to which we 
have all been called? The solemn promises of baptism. What 
have we promised at baptism? To renounce the world, the de- 
vil, and the flesh: These are our vows: This is the situation of 
the Christian: These are the essential conditions of our cove- 
nant with God, by which eternal life has been promised to us. 
These truths appear familiar, and destined for the common 
people; but it is a mistake. Nothing can be more sublime; 
and, alas! nothing is more generally unknown. It is at the 
courts of kings, and to the princes of the earth, that without 
ceasing we ought to announce them. Alas ! they are well in- 
structed in all the affairs of the world, while the first principles 
of Christian morality are frequently more unknown to them 
than to humble and simple hearts. At your baptism you have 
then renounced the world. It is a promise you have made to 
God, before the holy altar; the church has been the guarantee 
and depositary of it; and you have only been admitted into the 
number of believers, and marked with the indefeasible seal of 
salvation, upon the faith that you have sworn to the Lord, to 
love neither the world, nor what the world loves. Had you 
then answered, what you now repeat every day, that you find 
not the world so black and pernicious as we say; that after all 
it may innocently be loved; and that we only decry it so much, 
because we do not know it; and since you are to live in the 
world, you wish to live like those who are in it; Had you an- 
swered thus, the church would not have received you into its 
bosom; would not have connected you with the hope of Chris- 
tians, nor joined you in communion with those who have over- 



30 



ON THE SMALL NUMBER [Serm. II. 



come tlie world. She would have advised you to go and live 
with those infidels who know not our Saviour. For this reason 
it was, that, in former ages, those of the Catechumen, who 
could not prevail upon themselves to renounce the world and its 
pleasures, put off their baptism till death; and durst not ap- 
proach the holy altar, to contract, by the sacrament, which re- 
generates us, engagements of which they knew the importance 
and sanctity; and to fulfil which they felt themselves still un- 
qualified. You are therefore required, by the most sacred of all 
vows, to hate the world; that is to say, not to conform your- 
selves to it. If you love it, if you follow its pleasures and cus- 
toms, you are not only as St. John says, the enemy of God, but 
you likewise renounce the faith given in baptism; you abjure 
the gospel of Jesus Christ; you are an apostate from religion, 
and trample under foot the most sacred and irrevocable vows 
that man can make. Now, what is this world which you ought 
to hate? I have only to answer, that it is the one you love. 
You will never mistake it by tins mark: This world is a society 
of sinners, whose desires, fears, hopes, cares, projects, joys, and 
chagrins, no longer turn but upon the successes or misfortunes 
of this life. This world is an assemblage of people who look 
upon the earth as their country; the time to come as an exile- 
ment; the promises of faith as a dream; and death as the 
greatest of all misfortunes. This world is a temporal kingdom, 
where our Saviour is unknown; where those acquainted with 
his name glorify him not as their Lord; hate his maxims; de- 
spise his followers; and neglect or insult him in his sacraments 
and worship. In a word, to give a proper idea at once of this 
world, it is the great number; behold the world, which you 
ought to shun, hate, and combat against by your example ! 

Now, is this your situation with regard to the world? Are 
its pleasures a fatigue to you; do its excesses afflict you; do you 
regret the length of your pilgrimage here? Are not its laws your 
laws; its maxims your maxims? What it condemns, do you 
not condemn? Do you not approve what it approves? And 
should it happen, that you alone were left upon the earth, may 
we not say, that the corrupted world would be revived in you; 
and that you would leave an exact model of it to your posterity? 
When I say you, I mean, and I address myself to almost all men. 

Where are those who sincerely renounce the pleasures, habits, 
maxims, and hopes of this world? We find many who complain 
of it; and accuse it of injustice, ingratitude, and caprice; who 
speak warmly of its abuses and errors; but in decrying, they 
continue to love, to follow it; they cannot bring themselves to 
do without it; in complaining of its injustice, they are only 
piqued at it, they are not undeceived; they feel its hard treat- 
ment, but they are unacquainted with its dangers; they censure, 
but where are those who hate it? And now, my brethren, you 
may judge if many can have a claim to salvation. 



Serm. IL] OF THE SAVED. 



31 



In the second place, you have renounced the flesh at your 
baptism; that is to say, you are engaged not to live according 
to the sensual appetites; to regard even indolence and effemi- 
nacy as crimes; not to flatter the corrupt desires of the flesh; 
but to chastise, crush, and crucify it. This is not an acquired 
perfection; it is a vow; it is the first of all duties; the charac- 
ter of a true Christian, and inseparable from faith. In a word, 
you have anathematized Satan and all his works. And what 
are his works? That which composes almost the thread and 
end of your life; pomp, pleasure, luxury, and dissipation; lying, 
of which he is the father; pride, of which he is the model; 
jealousy and contention, of which he is the artizan. But I ask 
you, where are those who have not withdrawn the anathema 
they had pronounced against Satan? Now, consequently, (to 
mention it as we go along,) behold many of the questions an- 
swered. 

You continually demand of us, if theatres, and other public 
places of amusement, be innocent recreations for Christians? 
In return, I have only one question to ask you. Are they the 
works of Satan or of Jesus Christ? for there can be no medium 
in religion. I mean not to say, but what many recreations and 
amusements may be termed indifferent. But the most indiffer- 
ent pleasures which religion allows, and which the weakness of 
our nature renders even necessary, belong, in one sense, to Je- 
sus Christ, by the facility with which they ought to enable us 
to apply ourselves to more holy and more serious duties. Every 
thing we do, every thing we rejoice or weep at, ought to be of 
such a nature as to have a connexion with Jesus Christ, and to 
be done for his glory. Now, upon this principle, the most in- 
contestible, and most universally allowed in Christian morality, 
you have only to decide whether you can connect the glory of 
Jesus Christ with the pleasures of a theatre. Can our Saviour 
have any part in such a species of recreation? And before you 
enter them, can you, with confidence, declare to him, that, in so 
doing, you only propose his glory, and to enjoy the satisfaction 
of pleasing him? What! The theatres, such as they are at pre- 
sent, still more criminal by the public licentiousness of those un- 
fortunate creatures who mount them, than by the impure and 
passionate scenes they represent: The theatres are the works of 
Jesus Christ? Jesus Christ would animate a mouth, from 
whence are to proceed sounds lascivious, and intended to cor- 
rupt the heart? But these blasphemies strike me with horror. 
Jesus Christ would preside in assemblies of sin, where every 
thing we hear weakens his doctrines; where the poison enters 
into the soul by all the senses; where every art is employed to 
inspire, awaken, and justify the passions he condemns? Now, 
says Tertullian, if they are not the works of Jesus Christ, they 
must be the works of Satan. Every Christian, therefore, ought 



32 



ON THE SMALL NUMBER [Serm. II. 



to abstain from them. When he partakes of them, he violates 
the vows of baptism. However innocent he may flatter himself 
to be, in bringing from these places an untainted heart, it is 
sullied by being there,* since by his presence alone he has par- 
ticipated in the works of Satan, which he had renounced at 
baptism, and violated the most sacred promises he had made to 
Jesus Christ and to his Church. 

These, my brethren, as I have already told you, are not merely 
advices and pious arts; they are the most essential of our obli- 
gations. But, alas! who fulfils them? who even knows them? 
Ah! my brethren, did you know how far the title you bear, of 
Christian, engages you; could you comprehend the sanctity of 
your state; the hatred of the world, of yourself, and of every 
thing, which is not of God, that it ordains you; that life, ac- 
cording to the gospel, that continual watching, that guard over 
the passions; in a word, that conformity with Jesus Christ cru- 
cified, which it exacts of you: could you comprehend it; could 
you remember, that as you ought to love God with all your 
heart, and all your strength, a single desire that has not con- 
nexion with him defiles you, you would appear a monster in 
your own sight. How ! would you say to yourself, duties so 
holy, and morals so profane ! A vigilance so continual, and a 
life so careless and dissipated ! A love of God so pure, so com- 
plete, so universal, and a heart the continual prey of a thousand 
impulses, either foreign or criminal. If thus it is, who, O my 
God! will be entitled to salvation? 

Few, indeed, I am afraid, my dear hearers; at least it will not 
be you, (unless a change takes place), nor those who resemble 
you; it will not be the multitude. Who shall be saved? those 
who work out their salvation with fear and trembling; who live 
in the midst of the world, but not like the world. Who shall be 
saved? that Christian woman, who, shut up in the circle of her 
domestic duties, rears up her children in faith and in piety; di- 
vides her heart only betwixt her Saviour and her husband; is 
adorned with delicacy and modesty: sits not down in the as- 
semblies of vanity; makes not a law of the ridiculous customs 
of the world, but regulates those customs by the laws of God; 
and makes virtue appear more amiable by her rank and example. 
Who shall be saved? That believer, who, in the relaxation of 
modern times, imitates the manners of the first Christians; 
whose hands are clean, and his heart is pure; watchful; " who 
hath not lift up his soul to vanity;" but who, in the midst of the 
dangers of the great world, continually applies himself to purify 
* v it; just, who swears not deceitfully against his neighbour, nor 
is indebted to fraudulent ways for the innocent aggrandisement 
of his fortune; generous, who with benefit repays the enemy 
who sought his ruin; sincere, who sacrifices not the truth to a 
vile interest, and knows not the part of rendering himself agree- 
able, by betraying his conscience; charitable, who makes his 



Serm. II.] 



OF THE SAVED. 



33 



house and interest the refuge of his fellow-creatures, and him- 
self the consolation of the afflicted; regards his wealth as the 
property of the poor; humble in affliction, Christian under in- 
juries, and penitent even in prosperity. Who will merit salva- 
tion? You, my dear hearer, if you will follow these examples; 
for such are the souls to be saved. Now these assuredly do not 
form the greatest number. While you continue, therefore, to 
live like the multitude, it is a point of belief that you cannot 
pretend to salvation. 

These, my brethren, are truths which should make us trem- 
ble; nor are they those vague ones which are told to all men, 
and which none apply to themselves. Perhaps there is not in 
this assembly, an individual, who may not say of himself, " I 
live like the great number; like those of my rank, age, and si- 
tuation; I am lost should I die in this path." Now, can any 
thing be more capable of alarming a soul, in whom some remains 
of care for his salvation still exist? It is the multitude, never- 
theless, who tremble not. There is only a small number of 
just, which operates apart its salvation, with fear and trembling; 
all the rest are tranquil. After having lived with the multitude, 
they flatter themselves they shall be particularized at death; 
every one augurs favourably for himself, and chimerieally thinks 
he shall be an exception. 

On this account it is, my brethren, that I confine myself to 
you who at present are assembled here : I include not the rest 
of men; but consider you as alone existing on the earth. The 
idea which occupies and frightens me, is this, — I figure to my- 
self the present, as your last hour, and the end of the world; 
that the heavens are going to open above your heads; our 
Saviour in all his glory, to appear in the midst of this tem- 
ple; and that you are only assembled here to wait his com- 
ing, like trembling criminals, on whom the sentence is to be 
pronounced, either of life eternal or of everlasting death; for 
it is vain to flatter yourselves that you shall die more innocent 
than you are at this hour. All those desires of change with 
which you are amused, will continue to amuse you till death 
arrives; the experience of all ages proves it; the only difference 
you have to expect, will most likely be only a larger balance 
against you than what you would have to answer for at present; 
and from what would be your destiny, were you to be judged 
this moment, you may almost decide upon what will take place 
at your departure from life. Now, I ask you, (and, connecting 
my own lot with yours, I ask it with dread), were Jesus Christ 
to appear in this temple, in the midst of this assembly, to judge 
us, to make the dreadful separation betwixt the goats and sheep, 
do you believe that the greatest number of us would be placed 
at his right hand? Do you believe that the number would at 
least be equal? Do you believe there would even be found ten 
upright and faithful servants of the Lord, when formerly five 

c 



34. 



ON THE SMALL NUMBER [Sum. II. 



cities could not furnish so many? I ask you. You know not; 
and I know it not. Thou alone, O my God ! knowest who be- 
long to thee. 

But if we know not who belong to him, at least we know 
that sinners do not. Now, who are the just and faithful assem- 
bled here at present? Titles and dignities avail nothing; you 
are stripped of all these in the presence of your Saviour. Who 
are they? Many sinners, who wish not to be converted; many 
more who wish, but always put it off; many others, who are 
only converted in appearance, and again fall back to their for- 
mer courses. In a word a great number, who flatter themselves 
they have no occasion for conversion. This is the party of the 
reprobate. Ah ! my brethren, cut off from this assembly these 
four classes of sinners, for they will be cut off at the great day. 
And now appear, ye just: Where are ye? O God! where are 
thy chosen ? And what a portion remains to thy share ! 

My brethren, our ruin is almost certain; yet we think not of 
it. When, even in this terrible separation which will one day 
take place, there should be only one sinner in this assembly on 
the side of the reprobate; and that a voice from heaven should 
assure us of it, without particularising him, who of us would 
not tremble, lest he should be the unfortunate and devoted wretch? 
Who of us would not immediately apply to his conscience, to 
examine if its crimes merited not this punishment? Who of 
us, seized with dread, would not demand of our Saviour, as the 
apostles formerly did, and say, " Lord, is it I?" And should a 
small respite be allowed to our prayers, who of us would not 
use every effort, by tears, supplications, and sincere repentance, 
to avert the misfortune? Are we in our senses, my dear hear- 
ers? Perhaps among all who listen to me, ten just would not 
be found; perhaps fewer. What do I know, O my God? I dare 
not with a fixed eye regard the depths of thy judgments and thy 
justice. More than one, perhaps, would not be found amongst 
us all. And this danger affects you not, my dear hearer? You 
persuade yourself, that in this great number who shall perish, 
you will be the happy individual; you, who have less reason, per- 
haps, than any other to believe it; you, upon whom alone the 
sentence of death should fall, were only one of all who hear me 
to suffer? Great God! how little are the terrors of thy law 
known to the world ! In all ages, the just have shuddered with 
dread, on reflecting on the severity and extent of thy judgments 
upon the destinies of men. Alas ! what do they prepare for the 
children of Adam ! 

But what are we to conclude from these grand truths? That 
all must despair of salvation? God forbid. The impious alone 
to quiet his own feelings in his debaucheries, endeavours to per- 
suade himself that all men shall perish as well as he. 

This idea ought not to be the fruit of the present discourse. 
It is meant to undeceive you with regard to the general error, 



Serm. II.] 



OF THE SAVED. 



35 



that any one may do whatever others do ; to convince you, that, in 
order to merit salvation, you must distinguish yourself from the 
rest; in the midst of the world, lead a life to the glory of God, 
and resemble not the multitude. 

When the Jews were led in captivity from Judea to Babylon, 
a little before they quitted their own country, the prophet Jere- 
miah, whom the Lord had forbid to leave Jerusalem, spoke thus 
to them: 44 Children of Israel, when you shall arrive at Babylon, 
you will behold the inhabitants of that country, who carry upon 
their shoulders gods of silver and gold. All the people will 
prostrate themselves, and adore them. But you, far from al- 
lowing yourselves, by these examples, to be led to impiety, say 
to yourselves in secret, It is thou, O Lord! whom we ought to 
adore." 

Let me now finish, by addressing to you the same words. 

At your departure from this temple, you go to enter into 
another Babylon; you go to see idols of gold and silver, before 
which all men prostrate themselves; you go to regain the vain 
objects of human passions, wealth, glory, and pleasure, which 
are the gods of this world, and which almost all men adore; 
you will see those abuses which all the world permits; those 
errors which custom authorises; and those debaucheries which 
an infamous fashion has almost constituted as laws. Then, my 
dear hearer, if you wish to be of the small number of true Is- 
raelites, say, in the secrecy of your heart, It is thou alone, O 
my God! whom we ought to adore. I wish not to have con- 
nexion with a people which know thee not; I will have no other 
law than thy holy law; the gods which this foolish multitude 
adores, are not gods; they are the work of the hands of men; 
they will perish with them: Thou alone, O my God! art im- 
mortal; and thou alone deservest to be adored. The customs 
of Babylon have no connexion with the holy laws of Jerusa- 
lem; I will continue to worship thee with that small number 
of the children of Abraham, which still, in the midst of an infidel 
nation, composes thy people; with them I will turn all my de- 
sires towards the Holy Sion; the singularity of my manners will 
be regarded as a weakness; but blessed weakness, O my God! 
which will give me strength to resist the torrent of customs, 
and the seduction of example; thou wilt be my God in the midst 
of Babylon, as thou wilt one day be in Jerusalem. 

Ah! the time of the captivity will at last expire; thou wilt 
call to thy remembrance Abraham and David; thou wilt deliver 
thy people; thou wilt transport us to the holy city; then wilt 
thou alone reign over Israel, and over the nations which at pre- 
sent know thee not. All being destroyed; all the empires and 
sceptres of the earth; all the monuments of human pride anni- 
hilated; and thou alone remaining eternal, we then shall know 
that thou art the Lord of hosts, and the only God to be adored. 

Behold the fruit which you ought to reap from this discourse; 
live apart; think, without ceasing, that the great number work 



36 



THE DISGUSTS 



[Serm. III. 



tkeir own destruction; regard as nothing all customs of the 
earth, unless authorised hy the law of God; and remember, that 
holy men have, in all ages, been always looked upon as singular. 

It is thus, that after distmguishing yourselves from the sin- 
ful on earth, you will be gloriously separated from them in 
eternity. 

Now, to God the father, &c. 



SERMON III. 
THE DISGUSTS ACCOMPANYING VIRTUE. 

John x. 31. 

Then the Jews took up stones again, to stone him. 

Behold then, my brethren, the marks of gratitude which Jesus 
Christ receives from men; behold the consolations which Hea- 
ven prepares for him in the painful exercise of his ministry. 
There he is treated as a Samaritan, and possessed by the devil: 
Here they take up stones to stone him. It is thus that the Son 
of God has passed all the time of his mortal life, continually 
exposed to the most obstinate contradiction, finding only hearts 
insensible to his kindnesses, and rebellious to the truths wliich 
he announced to them: yet never did he allow the smallest 
sign of impatience, or the least complaint to escape him. 

And we, my brethren, we, his members and his disciples, 
alas ! the smallest disgusts, the smallest contradictions we expe- 
rience in the practice of virtue, revolt our delicacy; from the 
moment we cease to relish those attractions, that sensibility 
which softens every thing to be found in painful duty, there is 
nothing but complaint and murmurs; troubled, discouraged, we 
are tempted almost to abandon God, and to return to the world, 
as a more agreeable and commodious master. In a word, we 
would wish to find nothing in the service of God but pleasure 
and consolation. 

But our divine Master, in calling us to his service, has he 
not declared in express terms, that the kingdom of heaven is 
only to be gained by conquest ; and that none but those who do 
violence upon themselves can force it? And what do these 
words signify? unless that, entering into the service of God, 
we are not to promise ourselves that we shall always find in it 
a certain sweetness, a certain relish, which deprives it of all 
pain, and causes it to be loved: on the contrary, it is almost 
certain, that in it we shall experience disgusts and contradic- 



Serm. III.] ACCOMPANYING VIRTUE. 37 

tions which will exercise our patience, and put our fidelity to 
frequent trials; that we shall often feel the weight of the yoke, 
without feeling the unction of grace which renders it light and 
easy ; because piety essentially opposes the gratification of our 
former tastes and original inclinations, for which we always pre- 
serve some unhappy remains of tenderness, and which we cannot 
mortify, without making the heart suffer; that besides we shall 
have to undergo the eternal caprices of an inconstant and vola- 
tile heart, so difficult to fix, that without reason or foundation, 
it is disgusted in a moment with what it formerly loved most. 
Behold, my brethren, what we ought to have expected when we 
embrace the cause of virtue. Here, it is the time of combat 
and trials; peace and felicity are only for heaven; but, notwith- 
standing this, I say that it is unjust to form, from the disagree- 
able circumstances which may accompany virtue in this life, a 
pretext either to abandon God when we have begun to serve 
him, or to be afraid to serve him when we have begun to know 
him. 

Behold my reasons: In the first place, because disgusts are 
inevitable in this life; secondly, because those of piety are not 
so bitter as we imagine them to be; thirdly, because they are 
less so than those of the world; fourthly, because, were they 
equally so, they yet possess resources which those of the world 
have not. Let us investigate those edifying truths, and im- 
plore the assistance of divine grace towards their proper expla- 
nation. 

Reflection I. I say, in the first place, because disgusts are 
inevitable in this life. Alas ! we complain that the service of 
God disgusts us; but such is the condition of this miserable 
life. Man, born fully to enjoy God, cannot be happy here be- 
low, where he can never but imperfectly possess him; disgusts 
are a necessary consequence of the inquietude of a heart which 
is out of its place and is unable to find it on the earth; which 
seeks to fix itself, but cannot with all the created beings which 
surround it; which, disgusted with every thing else, attaches it- 
self to God; but being unable to possess him as fully as it is ca- 
pable of doing, feels always that something is wanting to its 
happiness; agitates itself, in order to attain it, but can never 
completely reach it here; finds in virtue almost the same void 
and the same disgusts it had found in sin; because, to what- 
ever degree of grace it may be exalted, there still remains much 
to accomplish before it can arrive at that fulness of righteousness 
and love which will possess our whole heart — will fill all our 
desires — extinguish all our passions — occupy all our thoughts — 
and which we can never find but in heaven. 

Were it possible to be happy in this world, we should un- 
doubtedly be so in serving God, because grace calms our pas- 



38 



THE DISGUSTS 



[Sekm. Ill 



sions, moderates our desires, consoles our sufferings, and gives 
us a foretaste of that perfect happiness we expect, and which we 
shall not enjoy hut in a blessed immortality. Of all the situa- 
tions in which man can find himself in this life, that of right- 
eousness undoubtedly brings him nearest to felicity; but as it 
always leaves him in the path which conducts to it, it leaves 
him likewise still uneasy, and in one sense miserable. 

We are therefore unjust to complain of the disgusts which 
accompany virtue. Did the world make its followers happy, 
we should then have reason to be dissatisfied at not being so in 
the service of God. We might then accuse him of using his 
servants ill; of depriving them of a happiness which is due to 
them alone; that far from attracting, he rejects them; and that 
the world is preferable to him, as a more consoling and faithful 
master. But examine all stations ; interrogate all sinners; con- 
sult in rotation the partizans of all the different pleasures which 
the world promises, and the different passions which it inspires ; 
the envious, the ambitious, the voluptuous, the indolent, the re- 
vengeful; none are happy; each complains; no one is in his 
place; every condition has its inconveniences; and sorrows are 
attached to every station in life. The world is the habitation 
of the discontented; and the disgusts which accompany virtue, 
are much more a consequence of the condition of this mortal 
life, than any imperfection in virtue itself. 

Besides, the Almighty has his reasons for leaving the most 
upright souls below in a state, in some respects, always violent 
and disagreeable to nature: By that, he wishes to disgust us 
with this miserable life; to make us long for our deliverance, 
and for that immortal country where nothing shall more be 
wanting to our happiness. 

I feel within me (says the apostle) a fatal law in opposition 
to the law of God; the good that I would, I do not; but the 
evil which I would not, that I do. Now, if I do that I would 
not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I 
find then a law, that when I would do good, evil is present with 
me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man; 
but I see another law in my members, warring against the law 
of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin 
which is in my members. O wretched man that I am ! who 
shall deliver me from the body of this death? — Behold the most 
natural effect which the disgusts attached to virtue ought to 
operate in a Christian heart: Hatred of ourselves; contempt of 
the present life; a desire for eternal riches; an eager anxiety to 
go and enjoy God, and to be delivered from all the miseries in- 
separable from this mortal life. 

Besides, were virtue always to be accompanied with sensible 
consolations; did it continually form for man a happy and 
tranquil state in this world, it would become a temporal recom- 
pense; in devoting ourselves to God, we should no longer seek 



Serm. III.] ACCOMPANYING VIRTUE. 



the good of faith, but the consolations of self-love; we would 
seek ourselves, while pretending to seek God; we would pro- 
pose, to ourselves in virtue, that conscious tranquillity, in which 
it places the heart, by delivering it from those violent and rest- 
less passions which tear it continually, rather than the observ- 
ance of the rules and the duties which the law of God imposes 
on us. The Lord would then have only mercenary and inte- 
rested worshippers, who would come, not to carry his yoke, but 
to repose themselves under the shadow of his voice; workmen, 
who would offer themselves, not so much to labour in his vine- 
yard, and support the fatigues of the day, and the oppression of 
the heat, as in order to taste in tranquillity the fruits; servants, 
who, far from improving their talent for the benefit of their 
master, would turn it to their own utility, and employ it only 
for their own advantage. 

The upright live by faith; now faith hopes, but enjoys not in 
this world; all is yet to come for Christians; their country, 
their riches, their pleasures, their inheritance, their kingdom; 
the present is not for them. Here, it is the time of tribulation 
and affliction; here, it is a place of exile, and a foreign 
country, where tears and sighs become the only consolation 
of the faithful. Surely then it is unreasonable to expect delights 
in a place where every thing recals the remembrance of our 
miseries; where every thing presents new dangers to us; 
where we live surrounded by rocks; where we are a prey 
to a thousand enemies; where every step endangers our de- 
struction; where all our days are marked by some new in- 
fidelity; where, delivered up to ourselves, and without the as- 
sistance of Heaven, we do nothing but evil; where we spread 
the corruption of our heart over the small portion, even of good, 
which grace enables us to accomplish ; it is unreasonable, I say, 
to seek felicity and human consolations in a residence so melan- 
choly and disagreeable to the children of God. The days of our 
mourning and sadness are in this world; those of peace and joy 
will come afterwards : If, by abandoning God, we could acquire 
real happiness, our inconstancy would seem at least to have an 
excuse; but, as I have already said, the world has its disgusts 
as well as virtue; by changing our master, we only change our 
punishment: in diversifying our passions, we only diversify our 
sorrows. The world has more smiling aspects, I confess, than 
virtue; but every where the reality is only trouble and vexation 
of spirit; and since cares are inevitable in this life, and we must 
encounter disgusts, either on the part of the world or of virtue, 
can we balance for a moment? Is it not preferable to suffer 
meritoriously than to suffer in vain, and be able to place our 
sufferings only amongst the number of our crimes? First truth: 
Disgusts are inevitable in this life. 

Reflect. II. But I say in the second place, that those of 
piety are not so bitter as we represent them to ourselves. 



40 



THE DISGUSTS 



[Seem. III. 



For, my brethren, although we agree that the kingdom of 
God suffers violence; that Jesus Christ is come, in order to 
make separations and retrenchments which cost much to our 
nature : that the period of the present life is the time of the birth 
of the new man, and always followed by pain and sorrows; and 
that in order to reconcile us to God, we must begin by waging 
a cruel war against ourselves; yet it does not follow that the 
lot of a soul, who serves the Lord, is to be pitied, and that the 
disgusts which accompany virtue are so bitter as the world re- 
presents. Virtue has only the prejudices of the senses and of 
the passions against it; it has nothing melancholy but the 
first glance; and its bitterness is not such as to render it a con- 
dition which we ought to fly from as insupportable and wretched. 

For, in the first place, we are sheltered in it from the disgusts 
of the world and the passions; and were virtue to possess only 
the single advantage of placing us safe from the tempests of the 
passions; from frenzies, jealousies, suspicions, and bitterness 
of heart; from the void of a worldly life; when, by turning to 
God, we should gain only our freedom from the yoke of the 
world; our being placed above the reach of its hopes, of its re- 
volutions, troubles, and eternal changes ; the becoming masters 
of our own hearts, and being dependent on none but ourselves; 
our having none but God to account with; our no longer fa- 
tiguing ourselves in vain, by running after phantoms, which 
continually elude our grasp; alas! the lot of a just soul would 
always be worthy of envy; whatever might be the bitter cir- 
cumstances accompanying virtue, they would still be a thousand 
times more supportable than the pleasures of the world; and to 
mourn with the people of God, would be infinitely preferable to 
participating in the insipid and childish pleasures of the chil- 
dren of the age. 

Secondly, If virtue does not protect us from the afflictions 
and disgraces inevitable upon this earth, it at least softens their 
asperity; it makes our heart submissive to God; it makes us 
kiss the hand which is raised up against us; it discovers, in the 
blows with which the Lord afflicts us, either a cure for our pas- 
sions or the just punishment of our crimes. And were virtue 
to have only the privilege of diminishing our griefs, by diminish- 
ing our attachments; of rendering us less feeling to our losses, 
by gradually detaching us from all the objects which we may 
one day lose; of preparing our soul for affliction, by keeping it 
continually submissive to God ; were virtue to possess this con- 
solation alone, alas! ought we to lament and complain of any 
bitterness which attends it? What more can be desired in this 
miserable life, where almost all our days are distinguished by 
new afflictions and adversities; where every thing escapes our 
grasp; where our relations, friends, and protectors are every 
moment snatched from us, and continually falling around us; 
where our fortune has no settlement, but changes its appear- 



[Serm. III. ACCOMPANYING VIRTUE. 



41 



ance every day; alas ! what more can be desired than a situa- 
tion which consoles us on these events; supports us in these 
storms; calms us in these agitations; and which, in the eter- 
nal changes which take place here below, leaves us at least al- 
ways the same? 

Thirdly, Those reluctances and disgusts which revolt us so 
strongly against virtue, in reality consist only in repressing the 
passions which render us unhappy and are the source of all our 
pains; they are remedies a little grievous to be sure, but they 
serve to cure evils which are infinitely more so; it is a con- 
straint which fatigues us, but which, in fatiguing, delivers us 
from a slavery which weighed us down; it is a bitterness which 
mortifies the passions, but which, in mortifying, weakens and 
calms them; it is a sword which pierces the heart to the quick, 
but which makes the corrupted and defiled matter to flow out 
from it; in so much, that, in the very moment of the wound's 
greatest agony, we experience the comfort and certainty of a 
cure: These are maxims which revolt our nature and inclina- 
tions; but which, in revolting, recall them to order and rule. 
Thus, the bitterness and the thorns of virtue have always at 
least a present utility, which recompenses their harshness; in 
disgusting, they purify us; in probing, they cure us; in pain- 
ing, they calm us. These are not like the disgusts of the world 
of which nothing remains to us but the bitterness of those fa- 
tigues, of those constraints which our passions impose on us; 
and whose only fruit is, that of augmenting our miseries, by 
fortifying our iniquitous passions: These are not the worldly 
violences which lead to nothing, are of no value, and frequently 
serve only to render us hateful to those whom we would wish 
to please; which remove to a greater distance from us the fa- 
vours we wish to merit by them; which always leave us our 
hatreds, our desires, our uneasiness, and our pains: These are 
violences which advance the work of our sanctification, which 
by degrees destroy within us the work of sin; which perfect, 
which adorn us; which add every day a new splendour to our 
soul, a new solidity to our virtues, a new force to our faith, a 
new facility to our approaches towards salvation, a new firm- 
ness to our good desires, and which bear along with them the 
fruit that rewards and consoles us. 

I do not add, that the source of our disgusts is in ourselves 
rather than in virtue; that it is our passions which give birth 
to our repugnances; that virtue has nothing in itself but what 
is amiable; that were our hearts not depraved through love to 
the flesh, we would find nothing sweet and consoling but the 
pleasures of innocence; that we are born for virtue and right- 
eousness; that these ought to be our first inclinations, as they 
are our first distinction; and if we find different dispositions 
within us, at least we have not virtue, but only ourselves to 
blame. I could add, that perhaps it is the peculiar character of 



42 



THE DISGUSTS 



[Serm. III. 



our heart, which spreads for us so much hitterness through the 
detail of a Christain life: that being horn perhaps with more 
lively passions, and a heart more sensible to the world and to 
pleasure, virtue appears more melancholy and insupportable to 
us; that not finding in the service of God the same attraction 
which we have found in that of the world, one heart, accustom- 
ed to lively and animated pleasures, is no longer capable of re- 
conciling itself to the expected dreariness of a Christian life; 
that the endless dissipation in which we have lived, renders the 
uniformity of duties more irksome to us; the agitation of parties 
and pleasures, retirement more disgusting; our total submission 
to the passions, prayer more painful ; the frivolous maxims with 
which our minds are occupied, the truths of faith more insipid 
and more unknown; that our mind being filled with only vain 
things; with fabulous reading, if nothing worse; with chimeri- 
cal adventures, and theatrical phantoms, is no longer capable of 
relishing any thing solid; that never having accustomed our- 
selves to any thing serious, it is rare that the seriousness of piety 
does not disgust us, and that we find God to our taste, if I dare 
speak in this manner, we who have never relished any thing but 
the world and its vain hopes. This being the case, what happi- 
ness when we bring back to virtue a heart yet uncorrupted by 
the world! What happiness to enter into the service of God, 
with happy inclinations and some remains of our original inno- 
cence! When we begin early to know the Lord; when we re- 
turn to liim in that first season of our life, when the world has 
not yet made such profound and desperate impressions; when 
the passions, still in their growth, bend easily towards good and 
make virtue as it were a natural inclination to us ! What hap- 
piness when we have been able to put an early check upon our 
heart; when we have accustomed it to bear the yoke of the 
Lord; and when we have arrested, almost in their infancy, pas- 
sions which render us miserable in our guilt and which like- 
wise occasion all the bitterness of our virtues ! How many un- 
easinesses, how many pangs does it prevent ! How many con- 
solations does it prepare ! How many comforts spread through 
the rest of life ! and what a difference for the ease and tranquil- 
lity of our future years, betwixt days whose primitive ones have 
been pure, and those which, infected in their source, have felt 
flow from thence a fatal bitterness, which has blasted all their 
joy, and spread itself through all the remainder of their car eer ! 
It is ourselves alone, says a holy father, who render virtue dis- 
agreeable; and we are wrong to complain of an evil, in which 
we have such a share ourselves, or to attribute faults to virtue 
which are our own handy- work. 

But granting these reflections to have even less solidity; 
were it even true, that we are not the first and original cause of 
our disgusts at virtue; it is at least incontestable, that the long- 
er we defer our return to God, the more invincible do we ren- 



Serm. III.] ACCOMPANYING VIRTUE. 



43 



der that distaste which separates us from him; that the more 
we shrink and draw back, the more do we fortify that repug- 
nance within us to virtue; that if the Christian life offers at 
present only melancholy and tedious duties, they will appear 
more insupportable in proportion as we grow old in the ways of 
the world, and in the taste for its iniquitous pleasures. Could 
the delay of our conversion sweeten the bitter and painful por- 
tion of virtue, by holding out a little longer against grace; could 
we obtain a more favourable composition, as I may say, and as 
an article of it, stipulate, that piety should afterwards be pre- 
sented to us with more charms and graces, and with conditions 
more agreeable and flattering; alas! whatever risks we may 
run by deferring it, the hopes of softening our pains and suffer- 
ings might serve in some measure to excuse our delays. But 
delay only prepares new sorrows for us; the more we accustom 
our heart to the world, the more do we render it unfit for vir- 
tue: It is no longer, says the prophet, but a polluted vase, to 
which the passions we have allowed to settle in it have com- 
municated a taste and smell of death, which generally last the 
remainder of life. Thus, my brethren, when, after a long course 
of crimes, and deeply-rooted passions, we must return to God, 
what obstacles do not these frightful dispositions present ! What 
insensibility towards good do we not find within ourselves! 
Those hearts, which the world has always engrossed, and who 
afterwards wish to consecrate to God the remains of a life en- 
tirely mundane; what a buckler of brass, says the prophet, do 
they not oppose to grace ! What hardness of heart to the holy 
consolations of virtue! They may find it just; but it is impos- 
sible, they say, to find it amiable: They may return to God; but 
they enjoy him no more : They may nourish themselves with the 
truth; but it is no more for them but the bread of tribulation 
and bitterness: They may seek the kingdom of God, and the 
treasure of the gospel; but it is like unfortunate slaves, con- 
demned to search for gold in the bowels of the earth, and waste 
their strength against the opposing rocks: They may draw for 
water from the wells of Jacob; but they can only reap the toil; 
they can never partake of those comforts and consolations which 
bear peace and refreshment to the soul: They wish to draw 
near to God, yet every thing separates them from him; they 
wish to fly from the world, yet, wherever they go, there they 
carry it with them in their heart: They seek the society of vir- 
tuous people, yet in their company they find a weariness, and 
a melancholy stiffness, which disgusts them with piety itself: 
They apply themselves to holy books; and, alas! it is only a 
tiresome and fatiguing decency which supports their patience. 
It appears, that in virtue they act a borrowed character, so lit- 
tle does it become them, and so much does their part constrain 
and tire them; and although, in reality, they seek salvation, 
yet there appears a something so foreign and constrained in their 



44 



THE DISGUSTS [Serm. III. 



efforts, that we believe they only assume the semblance of it; 
and that, feeling themselves not born to virtue, they wish at 
least to give themselves the appearance of it. 

Disgusts and wearinesses should not, therefore, drive us from 
virtue; since, in proportion as we retire from it, they become 
every day more violent and insupportable. But candidly, my 
brethren, is it for us to reproach God that we weary in his ser- 
vice? Ah! did our slaves and domestics make us the same re- 
proach; had they to lament the weariness they experience in 
our service, they would certainly be entitled to complain of it: 
Our eternal humours, from which they suffer so much; our 
fancies and caprices, to which they must accommodate them- 
selves; our hours and moments, to which they must subject 
themselves; our pleasures and tastes, to which they must sacri- 
fice their rest and liberty; our indolence, which alone costs 
them so much; makes them endure so much weariness; pass so 
many melancholy moments, without our even deigning to ob- 
serve it; they undoubtedly would be entitled to complain of 
their cruel situation and sufferings. 

Nevertheless, should they venture to say, that they weary in 
our service; that they reap not the smallest satisfaction from it; 
that they feel no inclination for us, and that every service they 
perform is disgusting to a degree scarcely supportable : Alas ! 
we would regard them as fools; we would find them too hap- 
py in having to support our humours and caprices; we would 
think them sufficiently honoured, by being permitted to be near 
us; and fully recompensed for all their fatigues. Ah, my 
brethren ! And God, does he not sufficiently recompense those 
who serve him, that they should support any little disgusts or 
wearinesses which may be found in his service? Are we not 
still too happy, by his acceptance of our services, in spite of 
the repugnances which render them cold and languid? Does 
he not sufficiently load us with blessings, to be entitled 
to exact our sufferance of a few slight sorrows for his sake? 
Does he not promise us still more, sufficiently precious to 
sweeten the trifling disgusts attached to the fulfilment of his 
ordinances? Must not he find it strange, that vile creatures, 
who hold all from him, who exist only through him, and 
who expect all from him, should complain of dislike to his 
service? That worms of the earth, whose only boast is the ho- 
nour of belonging to him, dare complain of feeling no inclina- 
tion for him, and that it is both melancholy and wearisome to 
serve or to be faithful to him ? Is he, then, a master like us ; 
fanciful, intolerant, indolent, entirely occupied with himself, and 
who seeks only to render himself happy, at the expense of the 
peace and comfort of those who serve him? Unjust that we are ! 
We dare offer reproaches to the Almighty, which we would re- 
gard as outrages upon ourselves, from the mouths of our slaves ! 



Serm. III.] ACCOMPANYING VIRTUE. 45 



Second Truth : The disgusts which accompany virtue are not 
so bitter as we represent them to ourselves. 

Reflect. III. But even were they so, I have said, in the 
third place, that they would still be infinitely less than those of 
the world: And it is here, my brethren, that the testimony of 
the world itself, and the self-experience of worldly souls, an- 
swer every purpose of a proof. For if you continue in the ways 
of the world, and of the passions, what is your whole life but a 
continual weariness, where, by diversifying your pleasures, you 
only diversify your disgusts and uneasinesses? What is it but 
an eternal void where you are a burthen to yourself? What is it but 
a pompous circulation of duties, attentions, ceremonies, amuse- 
ments, and trifles, which, incessantly revolving, possess one 
single advantage, that of unpleasantly filling up moments which 
hang heavy upon you, and which you know not otherwise to 
employ? What is your life but a flux and reflux of desires, 
hatreds, chagrins, jealousies, and hopes, which poison all your 
pleasures, and are the cause that, surrounded by every thing 
which ought to insure your happiness, you cannot succeed in 
being contented with yourselves? 

What comparison is there betwixt the frenzies of the pas- 
sions, the chagrin of a striking neglect, the sensibility of a bad 
office, and the slight sorrows of virtue? What comparison be- 
twixt the unlimited subjections to ambition; the fatigues and 
toils of pretensions and expectancies; the pains to insure suc- 
cess ; the exertions and submissions necessary to please; the 
cares, uneasinesses, and agitations, in order to exalt ourselves; 
and the slight violences which assure to us the kingdom of hea- 
ven? What comparison betwixt the frightful remorses of the 
conscience, that eternal worm, which incessantly gnaws us; 
that sadness of guilt, which undermines and brings us low in- 
deed; that weight of iniquity, which overwhelms us; that inter- 
nal sword, which pierces us to the quick; which we know not 
how to draw forth, and carry with us wherever we go; and the 
amiable sorrow of the penitence which operates salvation? My 
God ! can we complain of thee, after knowing the world? Can 
thy yoke appear grievous, after quitting that of the passions? 
And the thorns of thy cross, are they not flowers, when compared 
to those which the ways of iniquity and the world have sown? 

Thus every day we hear the worshippers of the world decry 
the world they serve; complain with the utmost dissatisfaction 
of their lot; utter the keenest invectives against its injustice 
and abuses; censure, condemn, and despise it; but find me, if 
you can, any truly pious souls, who send forth invectives against 
virtue; who condemn or despise it; and who detest their lot of 
being embarked in a voyage, so full of chagrin and bitterness. 
The world itself continually envies the destiny of the virtuous, 
and acknowledges that none are happy but the upright; but find 



46 



THE DISGUSTS 



[Serm. III. 



me a truly pious soul, who envies the destiny of the world; who 
publishes that none are happy but its partizans; who admires 
the wisdom of their choice, and regards his own condition as 
the most miserable and the most foolish: What shall I say? 
We have frequently seen sinners, who, through despair and dis- 
gust at the world, have fled to opposite extremes; lose rest, 
health, reason, and life; fall into states of horror, and the 
blackest melancholy, and no longer regard life but as the great- 
est torment. But where are the righteous, whom the disgusts 
which accompany virtue have thrown into such dreadful extre- 
mities? They sometimes complain of their sorrows; but they 
still prefer them to the pleasures of the passions: Virtue, it is 
true, may sometimes appear melancholy and unpleasing to them; 
but, with all her sadness, they love her much more than guilt: 
They would wish a few more sensible supports and consolations 
from the Father of Mercies, but they detest those of the world : 
They suffer, but the same hand which proves, supports them; 
and they are not tempted beyond their strength : They feel what 
you call the weight of the yoke of Jesus Christ; but, in recalling 
the load of iniquity, under which they had so long groaned, they 
find their present lot happy, and the comparison calms and com- 
forts them. 

In effect, my brethren, in the first place, the violences which 
we do to ourselves, are much more agreeable than those which 
come from without, and happen in spite of us. Now, the vio- 
lences of virtue are at least voluntary : These are crosses which 
we choose from reason, and impose upon ourselves from duty: 
They are often bitter, but we are consoled by the reflection of 
having chosen them. But the disgusts of the world are forced 
crosses, which come without our being consulted: It is a hate- 
ful yoke, which is imposed on us against our will: We wish it 
not; we detest it; yet nevertheless we must drink all the bit- 
terness of the cup. In virtue, we only suffer because it is our 
inclination to suffer. In the world, we suffer so much the more, 
in proportion as we wish it less, and as our inclinations are ini- 
mical to our sufferings. 

Secondly, The disgusts accompanying virtue are a burden 
only to indolence and laziness; these are repugnances, bitter 
only to the senses : But the disgusts of the world; ah ! they 
pierce to the quick; they mortify all the passions; they humble 
pride; pull down vanity; light up envy; mortify ambition; 
and none of our feelings escape the influence of their sadness 
and bitterness. 

Thirdly, Those of virtue are sensible only in their first ope- 
ration: The first efforts cost us much; the sequel softens and 
tranquillizes them; the passions, which are generally the occa- 
sion of any disgust at virtue, have this in particular, that the 
more we repress them, the more tractable they become: the 
violences we do to them, gradually calm the heart, and leave 



Serm. III.] ACCOMPANYING VIRTUE. 



47 



us less to suffer from those to come ; but the disgusts of the 
world are always new; as they always find in us the same pas- 
sions, they always leave us the same bitternesses; those which 
have gone before only render those that follow more insupport- 
able. 

In a word, the disgusts of the world inflame our passions, and 
consequently increase our sufferings; those of virtue repress 
them, and by these means gradually establish peace and tran- 
quillity in our soul. 

Fourthly, The disgusts of the world happen to those who 
most faithfully serve it: It does not treat them better, because 
they are more devoted to its party, and more zealous for its 
abuses; on the contrary, the hearts most ardent for the world, 
are almost always those who experience the largest share of its 
mortifications; because they feel more sensibly its neglect and 
injustice: Their ardour for it is the source of all their uneasi- 
nesses. But with God, we have only our coldness to dread; 
for the disgusts which may accompany virtue, in general, have 
only relaxation and idleness for principle; the more our ardour 
for the Lord increases, the more do our disgusts diminish; the 
more our zeal inflames, the more do our repugnances weaken; 
the more we serve him with fidelity, the more charms and con- 
solations do we find in his service: It is by relaxing, that we 
render our duties disagreeable; it is by lessening our fervour, 
that we add a new weight to our yoke; and if, in spite of our 
fidelity, the disgusts continue, they are then trials, and not 
punishments; it is not that consolations are refused, it is a new 
occassion of merit which is prepared for us : it is not an irritated 
God, who shuts his heart to us, it is a merciful God, who pu- 
rifies our own; it is not a discontented master, who suspends 
his favours, it is a jealous Lord, who wishes to prove our love; 
our homages are not rejected, our submissions and services are 
only anticipated; it is not meant to repulse, but to assure to us 
the price of our sufferings, by rejecting every thing which might 
still mingle the man with God; ourselves with grace; human 
supports with the gifts of Heaven: and the riches of faith with 
the consolations of self-love. Behold, my brethren, the last 
truth with which I shall terminate this discourse: Not only the 
disgusts accompanying virtue, are not so bitter as those of the 
world, but they likewise possess resources which those of the 
world have not. 

Reflect. IV. I say resources: Alas! my brethren, we find 
none but in virtue. The world wounds the heart; but it fur- 
nishes no remedies: It has its chagrins, but nothing to comfort 
them: It is full of disgusts and bitterness, but we find no re- 
sources in it. But in virtue there is no sorrow which has not 
its consolation; and if in it we find repugnances and disgusts, 
we find likweise a thousand resources which soothe them. 



48 



THE DISGUSTS 



[Serm. III. 



In the first place, Peace of heart and the testimony of the 
conscience. What luxury, to be at peace with ourselves; no 
longer to carry within us that importunate and corroding worm 
which pursued us everywhere; no longer to he racked by eternal 
remorses, which poisoned every comfort of life: In a word, to 
be delivered from iniquity ! The senses may still suffer from 
the sorrows of virtue, but the heart at least is tranquil. 

Secondly, The certainty that our sufferings are not lost; 
that our sorrows become a new merit for us; that our repug- 
nances, in preparing for us new sacrifices, secure an additional 
claim to the promises of faith; that were virtue to cost us less, 
it would likewise bear an inferior price in the sight of God; 
and that he only renders the road so difficult, in order to render 
our crown more brilliant and glorious. 

Thirdly, Submission to the orders of God, who has his rea- 
sons for refusing to us the visible consolations of virtue; whose 
wisdom consults our interest more than our passions; and who 
has preferred bringing us to himself by a less agreeable road, 
because it is a more secure one. 

Fourthly, The favours with which he accompanies our sor- 
rows; which sustain our faith at the same time that our vio- 
lences lower self-love; which fortify our heart in truth, at the 
same time that our senses are disgusted with it; which make 
our mind prompt and fervent, although the flesh is weak and 
feeble, in so much, that he renders our virtue so much the more 
solid as to us it seems melancholy and painful. 

Fifthly, The external succours of piety, which are so many 
new resources in our faintings and thirst: the holy mysteries, 
where Jesus Christ, himself the comforter of faithful souls, 
comes to console our heart; the truths of the divine writings, 
which promise nothing in this world to the upright but tri- 
bulation and tears, — calm our fears, by informing us that our 
pleasures are to come; and that the sufferings which discourage 
us, far from making us distrust our virtue, ought to render our 
hope more animated and certain: In a word the history of the 
saints, who have undergone the same disgusts and trials; con- 
sequently, we have so much the less reason to complain, as cha- 
racters so infinitely more pious than we, have experienced the 
same lot; that such has almost always been the conduct of God 
towards his servants; and that, if any thing in this life can 
prove his love towards us, it is that of his leading us by the 
same path that he did the saints, and treating us in this world 
in the same manner as he did the upright. 

Sixthly, The tranquillity of the life, and the uniformity of 
the duties, which have succeeded to the frenzies of the passions 
and the tumult of a worldly life, which have provided for us 
much more happy and peaceful days than those we had ever 
passed in the midst of dissipation, and which, though they still 
leave us something to suffer, yet occasion us to enjoy a more 
tranquil and supportable lot. 



Serm. III.] ACCOMPANYING VIRTUE. 



49 



Lastly, Faith, which brings eternity nearer to us; which dis- 
covers to us the insignificancy of worldly affairs; that we ap- 
proach the happy term; that the present life is but a rapid in- 
stant; and consequently, that our sufferings cannot endure 
long, but that this fleeting moment of tribulation assures to us 
a glorious and immortal futurity, which will endure as long as 
God himself. What resources for a faithful heart ! What dis- 
proportion betwixt the sufferings of virtue and those of guilt! 
It is in order to make us feel the difference that God often per- 
mits the world to possess us for a time; that in youth we de- 
liver ourselves up to the sway of the passions; on purpose, that, 
when he afterwards recalls us to himself, we may know by ex- 
perience how much more easy is his yoke than that of the 
world. I will permit, says he in the Scriptures, that my peo- 
ple serve the nations of the earth for some time; that they al- 
low themselves to be seduced by their profane superstitions, in 
order that they may know the difference betwixt my service 
and the service of the kings of the earth; and that they may 
feel how much more easy is my yoke than the servitude of men. 

Happy the souls, who, in order to be undeceived, have had 
no occasion for this experience, and who have not so dearly 
bought the knowledge of this world's vanity, and the melan- 
choly lot of iniquitous passions. Alas ? since at last we must 
be undeceived, and must abandon and despise it; since the day 
will come, when Ave shall find it frivolous, disgusting, and in- 
supportable; when, of all its foolish joys, there shall no longer 
remain to us but the cruel remorse of having yielded to them; 
the confusion of having followed them; the obstacles to good 
which they will have left in our heart; why not anticipate and 
prevent such melancholy regrets? Why not do to-day what we 
ourselves allow must one day be done? Why wait till the world 
has made such deep wounds in our heart, to run afterwards to 
remedies, which cannot re-establish us without greater pain, and 
costing us doubly dear? We complain of some slight disgusts 
which accompany virtue ; but alas ! the first believers, who, to 
the maxims of the gospel, sacrificed their riches, reputation, and 
life; who run to the scaffolds to confess Jesus Christ; who 
passed their days in chains, in prisons, in shame and in suffe- 
rance, and to whom it cost so much to serve Jesus Christ; did 
they complain of the bitterness of his service? Did they re- 
proach him with rendering unhappy those who served him? 
Ah! they glorified themselves in their tribulation; they pre- 
ferred shame and disgrace with Jesus Christ to all the vain 
pleasures of Egypt; they reckoned as nothing, wheels, fires, 
and every instrument of torture, in the hopes of a blessed im- 
mortality, which would amply recompense their present suffer- 
ings: In the midst of torments they chaunted hymns; and re- 
garded as a gain, the loss of all, for the interest of their Mas- 
ter, What a life, in the ej^es of the flesh, is that of these un- 

D 



50 



THE DISGUSTS, &c. 



[Serm. IIL 



fortunate men, proscribed, persecuted, driven from their coun- 
try, having only dens and caverns for their habitation, regard- 
ed every where as the horror of the universe; become execrable 
to their friends, their fellow-citizens, and their relations ! They 
esteemed themselves happy in belonging to Jesus Christ; in 
their opinion, they could not too dearly purchase the glory of 
being his disciples, and the consolation of attending to his pro- 
mises. And we, my brethren, in the midst of too many of the 
conveniences of life; surrounded by too much abundance, 
prosperity, and worldly glory; finding, perhaps for our mis- 
fortune, in the applauses of the world, which cannot prevent it- 
self from esteeming worth, the recompense of virtue; — in the 
midst of our relations, our children, and our friends, we com- 
plain that it costs us too much to serve Jesus Christ; we mur- 
mur against the slight bitterness we experience in virtue; we 
almost persuade ourselves that God requires too much of his 
creatures: Ah! when the comparison shall one day be made 
betwixt these little disgusts which we exaggerate so much, and 
the crosses, the wheels, the fires, and all the tortures of the 
martyrs; the austerities of the anchorites; the fasts, the tears, 
and sufferings of so many holy penitents; alas! we shall then 
blush to find ourselves almost single before Jesus Christ; we 
who have suffered nothing for him; to whom his kingdom has 
cost nothing; and who individually bearing before his tribunal 
more iniquities than a number of saints together, cannot, how- 
ever, in assembling all our works of piety, compare them united 
to a single instance of their exertions, 

Let us cease, therefore, to complain of God, since he has so 
many reasons to complain of us; let us serve him, as he wishes 
to be served by us; if he softens our yoke, let us bless his good- 
ness, which prepares these consolations for our weakness; if he 
makes us feel the whole extent of its weight, let us still esteem 
ourselves happy that he designs, at that price, to accept of our 
works and homage. With equal gratitude, let us receive from 
his hand consolation or affliction, since every thing which pro- 
ceeds from him alike conducts us to him. Let us learn to be, 
as the apostle, in want or abundance, provided we belong to 
Jesus Christ: the essential part is not to serve him with plea- 
sure, it is to serve him with fidelity. In reality, my brethren, 
in spite of all the disgusts or repugnances which may accom- 
pany virtue, there is no real or true pleasure but in serving 
God; there is no solid consolation to be reaped but by attach- 
ing ourselves to him. No, said the sage, It is still better to 
feed upon the bread of wormwood and gall, with the fear of the 
Lord, than to live in the midst of pleasure and profane joys, 
under the lash of his wrath and indignation. Alas ! of what 
pleasure can we be capable, when we are the enemies of God? 
What pleasure can we taste, when we bear in our heart only 
the anguish and bitterness of guilt? No, says the sage once 



Serm. IV.] STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 51 



more, The fear of God can alone charm our weariness; soften 
our moments of melancholy; soothe our endless anguishes; and 
enable us to find a certain degree of sweetness even in the ^vils 
incident to our nature. It is that which renders retirement 
sweet, and enables us to enjoy repose, far from the world and 
its amusements: It is that which makes days pass quickly, and 
occupies in peace and tranquillity every moment; and, though 
apparently it allows us more leisure than a worldly life, yet it 
leaves a much smaller portion to weariness. 

Great God! what honour does not the world unintentionally 
pay to thy service ! What an affecting eulogium on the destiny 
of the upright is the lot of sinners 1 How well, my God, thou 
knowest to extort glory and praise from even thy enemies ! and 
how little excuse thou leavest to those souls who depart from 
*fhy paths, since, in order to draw them to virtue, thou makes t 
a resource to them even of their crimes; and employ est their 
wants to recal them to thy eternal mercies. 

Now to God, &c. 



SERMON IV. 

THE UNCERTAINTY OF RIGHTEOUSNESS IN A 
STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 

Luke iv, 38. 

And he rose out of the Synagogue, and entered into Simon's house : and 
Simon's wife's mother was taken with a great fever ; and they besought 
him for her. 

Nothing more naturally represents the situation of a languid 
and lukewarm soul, than the state of infirmity in which the 
gospel here describes Peter's mother-in-law to have been. It 
may be said, that coldness and indolence in the ways of God, 
though otherwise accompanied with a life free from enormities, 
is a kind of secret and dangerous fever, which gradually under- 
mines the powers of the soul, changes all its good dispositions, 
weakens its faculties, insensibly corrupts its inward parts, alters 
its propensities, spreads a universal bitterness through all its 
duties, disgusts it with every thing proper, with all holy and 
necessary nourishment; and finishes at last by a total extinc- 
tion and an inevitable death. 

This languor of the soul, in the path of salvation, is so much 
the more dangerous as it is less observed. 



52 STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. IV. 

Our exemption from open irregularity gives us confidence; 
the external regularity of conduct, which attracts from men 
those praises due only to virtue, flatters us; and the secret 
comparison we make of our morals with the excesses of those 
avowed sinners, whom the world and their passions govern, 
unites to hlind us. We regard our situation as a state, less per- 
fect indeed, hut always certain of salvation; seeing our con- 
science can only reproach us with indolence and negligence in 
the discharge of our duties; too lenient a correction of our ap- 
petites; self-love, and some slight infidelities, which do not 
bring death to the soul. Nevertheless, since the holy writings 
represent the adulterous and the lukewarm soul as equally re- 
jected by God; and as they pronounce the same anathema 
against those who despise the works of the Lord, and those who 
perform them with negligence, this state of coldness and lan- 
guor in the ways of God must necessarily be very suspicious 
with regard to salvation, both from the present dispositions 
which it gives to the soul, and from those to which, sooner or 
later, it never fails to lead it. 

I say, in the first place, from the present dispositions it gives 
to the soul; namely, a fund of indolence, self-love, disgust at 
virtue, infidelity, and deliberate disregard to every thing they 
believe not absolutely essential in their duties; dispositions 
that form a state very doubtful of salvation. 

Secondly, From those, to which, sooner or later, lukewarm- 
ness conducts us; namely, forge tfulness of God and an open 
and shameful departure from every thing sacred. 

From these I wish to establish two capital truths in this mat- 
ter, which expose the danger of a lukewarm and infidel life; 
and which, from their importance, will furnish us with subject 
for two discourses. The first, That it is very doubtful, whether, 
in this habitual state of coldness and languor, the lukewarm 
soul (as it believes) preserves the righteousness and sanctifying 
grace upon which it grounds its security. 

The second, That were it even less doubtful, whether it had 
preserved or lost, before God, the sanctifying grace, at any 
rate it is certain of being unable long to preserve it. 

The uncertainty of righteousness in a state of lukewarmness. 
This first truth will be the subject of the present discourse. 

The certainty of a departure from righteousness in that state, 
is the second truth, upon which, in the following one, I shall 
endeavour to mstruct you. 

Part I. "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive our- 
selves, and the truth is not in us," says an apostle. The purest 
virtue below is never free, therefore, from stain. Man, full of 
darkness and passions, since the entrance of sin into the world, 



Serm. IV.] STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 53 



cannot always be so attentive to regularity but that he must 
sometimes be deceived and err; nor so impressed with invisi- 
ble good but he will allow himself to be sometimes caught by 
worldly and ostensible riches i because their impressions on the 
mind are lively and quick, and they always find in our hearts 
dispositions too favourable to their dangerous seductions. 

The fidelity which the law of God exacts from just souls, ex- 
cludes not, therefore^ a thousand imperfections, inseparable from 
our nature, and from which the most guarded and watchful 
piety cannot defend itself; but of these there are two descrip- 
tions. The first, which happen through our weakness, are less 
infidelities than surprises, where the weight of corruption pre- 
ponderates over the inclination or choice: and which the Lord, 
says St. Augustine, permits to remain in the most faithful souls, 
in order to nourish their humility; excite their lamentations; 
reanimate their desires; their disgusts at their present exile- 
ment, and their longing for its termination : The second class 
are those which please us; which we justify to ourselves; which 
it appears impossible for us to renounce; which we look upon 
as necessary sweeteners of virtue; in which we see nothing 
criminal, because we perceive not the guilt; which form a part 
of the deliberate and general system of our morals and conduct, 
and constitute that state of indolence and coldness in the ways 
of God, which is the cause of condemnation to so many, born 
otherwise, perhaps, with principles of virtue, detestation of ini- 
quity, a fund of religion and fear of God, and happy disposi- 
tions for salvation. 

Now, I say, that this state of relaxation and infidelity; this 
tranquil and continued negligence of every thing which perhaps 
appears not essential in our duties; this effeminate indulgence 
of all our desires, so long as they offer not actual guilt to our 
sight; in a word, this life, altogether according to our animal 
nature, our humours, temperaments, and self-love, so common 
with those who make a public profession of piety, so safe in ap- 
pearance, so glorious even in the eyes of men, and to which the 
general error attaches the names of virtue and regularity: I say, 
that this is a state extremely doubtful to attain salvation; that it 
derives its source from an irregular heart, where the Holy Spirit 
no longer reigns; and that all the rules of faith induce us to 
think, that a soul of this description is already, without being 
sensible of it, fallen from righteousness and grace : In the first 
place, Because the desire of perfection essential to Christian 
piety is extinguished in his heart. Secondly, Because the rules 
of faith, almost always very uncertain in the distinction of guilt 
from venial errors, with regard to other sinners, are infinitely 
more so with respect to the unfaithful and lukewarm heart. 
Thirdly, Because, of all the external marks of a living and ha- 
bitual charity, there is not in it the smallest appearance of one. 



54 



STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. IV. 



Let us investigate these truths; for they are indeed worthy of 
your attention. 

Every Christian soul is obliged to bend every effort towards 
the perfection of his state. I say obliged; for although the 
degree of perfection be not comprised in the precept, to endea- 
vour at, to labour for perfection, is nevertheless a command- 
ment, and a duty essential to every believer. Be ye per- 
fect, says our Saviour, because the heavenly Father whom 
ye serve is perfect. I can perceive but one essential point, said 
St. Paul, viz. to forget whatever I have done to this period; 
(and what, my brethren, was he to forget? his endless labours, 
continual sufferings, and apostolic courses: so many nations 
converted to faith; so many illustrious churches founded; so 
many revelations and prodigies?); and, incessantly advancing, 
to direct my views to the attainment of what I have yet to per- 
form. The desire of perfection, the continued efforts to attain 
it, the holy inquietudes in consequence of the innumerable ob- 
stacles which check our progress, do not therefore comprise only 
a simple advice, and a practice reserved for the cloister and the 
desert alone,- — they form the essential state of a Christian, and 
the life according to faith, on this earth. 

For the life according to faith, which the just man leads, is 
only an uninterrupted desire that the kingdom of God may be 
accomplished in our hearts; a holy eagerness to form a perfect 
resemblance in us to Jesus Christ, and to increase even to the 
plenitude of the new man; a continual lamentation, excited by 
the internal sensibility of our own miseries, and by the load of 
corruption which oppresses the soul, and makes it to bear so 
many marks still of the worldly man; a daily struggle betwixt 
the law of the Spirit, which continually wishes to raise us above 
our sensual appetites, and the dominion of the flesh, which in- 
cessantly draws us back towards ourselves: Such is the state of 
faith, and of Christian piety. Whoever you be, great or of 
humble rank, prince, or subject, courtier or recluse, behold the 
perfection to which you are called; behold the ground- work and 
the spirit of your vocation. The austerities of an anchorite, the 
silence and solitude of the desart, the poverty of the cloister, 
are not demanded of you; but you are required to labour in- 
cessantly towards the repression of those internal desires which 
oppose themselves to the law of God; to mortify those rebel- 
lious inclinations which so unwillingly submit to order and duty; 
in a word, to advance, as much as possible, your perfect con- 
formity with Jesus Christ : Behold the degree of perfection to 
which Christian grace calls you, and the essential duty of a just 
soul. 

Now, from the moment you give way to every inclination,, 
provided it extends not to the absolute infraction of the precept, 
from the moment you confine yourselves to the essentials of the 



Seam. IV.] STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 55 

law; that you establish a kind of system of coldness and negli- 
gence that you say to yourselves, " We are unable to support 
a more exact or more exemplary life;" from that moment you 
renounce the desire of perfection; you no longer propose to 
yourselves an unceasing advancement towards that point of piety 
and holiness to which the Almighty calls you, and towards 
which his grace never ceases to impel you in secret: You no 
longer grieve over those miseries and weaknesses so inimical to 
your progress; you no longer wish the kingdom of God to be 
established in your hearts; you abandon, therefore, from that 
moment, the great work of righteousness, at which you are 
commanded to labour; you neglect the care of your soul; you 
enter not into the designs of grace. On the contrary, you 
check its holy impressions; you are no longer Christian: that 
is to say, that this disposition alone, this formal intention of li- 
miting yourselves to the essentials, and of regarding all the rest 
as laudable excesses, and works of supererogation, is a state of 
sin and death, since it is an avowed contempt of that great com- 
mandment which requires us to be perfect, that is to say to 
labour towards becoming so. 

Nevertheless, when we come to instruct you with regard to 
Christian perfection, you look upon it as to be found only in 
cloisters and solitudes, and scarcely will you deign to give the 
smallest attention to our instructions. You deceive yourselves 
my brethren; the individuals who adopt retirement, certainly 
employ austerities, fastings, and watchings, as means to succeed 
in that mortification of the passions to which 'we are all equal- 
ly invited: They engage themselves to a perfection of means, 
which I confess our state will not admit of; but the perfection 
of the end to which these means conduct, viz. the command 
and regulation of the affections, proper contempt of the world, 
detachment from ourselves, submission of the senses and the 
flesh to the Spirit, and renovation of the heart, are the perfec- 
tion of all states, the engagement of all Christians, and the co- 
venant of our baptism. To renounce this perfection, therefore, 
by limiting ourselves from choice, or in consequence of our rank 
in the world, to an effeminate, sensual, and worldly life, exempt 
only from striking enormities, is to renounce the Christian call- 
ing, and change the grace of faith, which has made us members 
of Jesus Christ, into a shameful and unworthy indolence. First 
reason : 

But, were this state even not so dubious for salvation with 
respect to the desire of that perfection essential to a Christian 
life, and which is extinguished in a lukewarm and unfaithful 
soul, it would become so by the imbecility which it occasions, 
and in which it places itself, of distinguishing in its conduct the 
infidelities which may extend to guilt, from those which may be 
termed simple errors. For though it is true that all sins are 
not sins which bring death, as St John observes, and that 



56 



STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. IV. 



Christian morality acknowledges errors, which only grieve the 
Holy Spirit within us, and others which extinguish it altogether 
in the soul; nevertheless, the rules which it furnishes to dis- 
tinguish these, can neither be always certain nor general at the 
moment they are applied; some circumstances relative to our- 
selves continually change their nature. I speak not here of 
those manifest and absolute transgressions of the precepts mark- 
ed in the law, which leave no hesitation respecting the enormi- 
ty of the offence: I speak of a thousand doubtful and daily 
transgressions; of hatred, jealousy, evil-speaking, sensuality, 
vanity, idleness, duplicity, negligence in the practice of our 
duties, and ambition; in all which it is extremely difficult to 
define how far the precept may be violated: Now, I say, that it 
is by the disposition alone of the heart that the measure and 
guilt of these faults can be decided; that the rules there are 
always uncertain and changeable; and that frequently what 
is only weakness or surprise in the just, is guilt and corruption 
not only in the sinner, but likewise in the lukewarm and un- 
faithful soul: This is proven by the following examples taken 
from the holy writings. 

Saul, in disobedience to the order of the Lord, spared the 
king of the Amalekites and the most precious spoils of that in- 
fidel prince. The crime does not appear considerable; but, as 
it proceeded from a fund of pride, of relaxation in the ways of 
God, and a vain complaisance in his victory, this action is the 
commencement of his reprobation, and the Spirit of God with- 
draws itself from him. Joshua, on the contrary, too credulous, 
spares the Gibeonites, whom the Lord had commanded him to 
exterminate; he went not before the ark to consult him, pre- 
vious to his alliance with these impostors. But this infidelity 
being an act of precipitancy and surprise, rather than a dis- 
obedience, and proceeding from a heart still faithful, religious, 
and submissive to God, it appears slight in his eyes, and the 
pardon almost immediately follows the crime. Now, if this 
principle be incontrovertible, upon what do you depend when 
you regard your daily and habitual infidelities as slight? Are 
you acquainted with all the corruption of your heart, from 
which they proceed? God knows it, who is the searcher and 
judge; and his eyes are very different from those of men. But 
if it be permitted to judge before the time, say, if this fund or 
indolence and infidelity which is in you; of voluntary perserve- 
rance in a state displeasing to God; of deliberate contempt for 
all the duties which you consider as not essential; of attention 
and care, as I may say, to, labour only for the Lord when he 
opens before you the gate of punishment and destruction: 
Say, if all these can constitute in his sight a state worthy of a 
Christian heart; and if faults, which proceed from so corrupted 
a principle, can in reality be slight, or worthy of indulgence? 
Paul, my brethren, that miraculous man, to whom the se- 



Serm. IV.] STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 



57 



crets of heaven had been revealed; Paul, who no longer lived 
for himself, hut in whom Jesus Christ alone lived; Paul, who 
earnestly longed every moment for the dissolution of his earthly 
body, that he might be clothed with immortality; this apostle, 
always ready to sacrifice his life for his master, and a willing 
victim to faith; this elected instrument of our Lord and Savi- 
our, whose conscience could reproach him with nothing, knew 
not, however, whether he merited the love or hatred of his 
Lord; whether he still possessed in his heart, or had forfeited, 
the invisible treasure of charity; and in these melancholy 
doubts, the testimony of his conscience was insufficient to calm 
his dread and uncertainty. David, that king so penitent, whose 
delights were centered in the constant meditation of the law of 
God, and whom the Holy Spirit calls a king after God's own 
heart; David trembles, however, lest the iniquity of his crimes 
be not sufficiently known to him; lest the corruption of his 
heart conceals not from him their enormity. He figures to him- 
self unknown gulfs in his conscience, which cause him to shed 
torrents of tears; to prostrate himself before the Majesty and 
Holiness of his God, and supplicate his assistance towards his 
purification from secret infidelities, by making him sensible of 
them. And you, who watch not, nor search your hearts; you 
who, devoted to lukewarm and sensual habits, with deliberate 
coolness allow yourselves every day a thousand infidelities, 
upon the iniquity of which you are utterly ignorant what judg- 
ment the Almighty may form: You, who every moment expe- 
rience those suspicious ebullitions of passion, where, in spite of 
all your self-indulgence, you find it so difficult to prove that 
the will has not accomplished the gratification; and that you 
have not overstepped that critical and dangerous line which dis- 
tinguishes actual guilt from involuntary error: You, in whom 
almost every action is suspicious; who every moment may be 
demanding at your own heart, " Have I not gone too far?" 
who, in your Own conscience, feel movements and regrets which 
you will never quiet: You who, in spite of so many just sub- 
jects of dread, believe the state of your conscience to be per- 
fectly known to you; that the decisions of your own self-love, 
fc with regard to your infidelities, are the decisions of the Almighty; 
nud that the Lord, whom you serve with so much coldness and 
TOegligence, does not yield you up to your own blindness, and 
punish your crimes by making you mistake them: You can 
possibly believe that you still preserve your righteousness, and 
the grace of sanctification, and can quiet yourselves upon your 
visible and habitual guilt, by a pretended invisible exercise of 
righteousness, of which you can produce neither mark nor 
proof? 

O man ! how little art thou acquainted with the illusions of 
the human heart, and the terrible judgments of God upon those 
souls which resemble thee ! Thou sayest to thyself, I am rich, I 



58 STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. IV. 



am loaded with the good things of this world: (with this our 
Saviour formerly reproached a cold and unhelieving soul:) 
And thou perceivest not, continued he, (for blindness and pre- 
sumption are the distinguishing character of coldness,) that in 
my sight, thou art poor, miserable, blind, and lost to every 
thing. It is the destiny, therefore, of a lukewarm and unfaith- 
ful soul, to live in error and illusion; to believe himself just and 
acceptable to God, while, alas ! before him, he is lost, without 
knowing it, to both grace and righteousness. 

And one reflection, which I beg you to make here, is, that 
the confidence of such souls is so much the more illusive and 
ill-founded, as there exists not a soul less capable of judging of 
his own heart than the lukewarm and unfaithful one. For the 
avowed sinner cannot conceal his crimes from himself; and he 
is sensible that he must assuredly be dead to the Lord: The 
just man, although ignorant whether he merits the love or ha- 
tred of his Master, enjoys nevertheless a conscience free from 
reproach; but the cold and unfaithful soul is involved in a state 
of continual and inexplicable mystery to itself. For this luke- 
warmness in the ways of God, enfeebling in us the lights of 
faith, and strengthening our passions, increases our darkness: 
Every infidelity is like an additional cloud, overspreading the 
mind and heart, which darkens to our sight the truths of salvay 
tion: In this manner the heart is gradually enveloped; the 
conscience becomes embarrassed; the lights of the mind are 
weakened: You are no longer that spiritual Christian, capable 
of a proper judgment. Insensibly you adopt maxims in secret, 
which, as you think, diminish your guilt; the blindness in- 
creases in the same proportion as the lukewarmness. 

The more you admit of this relaxation, in a more altered light 
do your duties and rules appear: What formerly appeared es- 
sential, no longer appears but a vain scruple: The omissions, 
which, in the period of fervour for duty and religion, would 
have excited in you the warmest compunctions, are now no 
longer regarded even as faults: The principles, the judgment, 
the lights of the mind, are all changed. 

Now, in this situation, who has told you, that, in the judg- 
ment which you form on the nature of your infidelities and your 
daily departure from virtue, you do not deceive yourselves 
Who has told you, that the errors which you think so slight are 
in reality so; and that the distant boundaries which you prescribe 
to guilt, and within which every thing to you appears venial, 
are really the limits of the law? Alas ! the most enlightened 
guides know not how to distinguish clearly in a cold and unbe- 
lieving conscience. These are what I may call the evils of that 
languor in which we know nothing; where the wisest of us can 
say nothing with certainty; and of which the secret cause is al- 
ways an enigma. You are sensible yourselves, that, in this 
state of relaxation, you experience in your hearts certain doubts 



Serm. IV.] STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 59 



and embarrassments which you can never sufficiently clear up : 
That in your consciences there always remains something secret 
and inexplicable, which you never wish to search into, or above 
half expose. These are not exaggerations; it is the real state 
and bottom of your soul, which you feel a reserve to lay open : 
You are sensible, that, even when prostrating yourselves before 
the Almighty, the confession of your guilt never entirely cor- 
responds with the most intimate dispositions of your heart; 
that it never paints your internal situation such as in reality it 
is; arid, in a word, that there always exists in your heart some- 
thing more criminal than what in any statement of it you can 
bring yourselves to avow. And, indeed, how can you be cer- 
tain, that in those continual self-gratifications; in that effeminacy 
of manners which composes your life; in that attention to every 
thing which may flatter the senses, or remove disquiet from 
you; to sacrifice, to indolence and laziness, all which appears 
not essential in your duties; how can you be certain, I say, that 
your self-love is not arrived at that fatal point which serves to 
give it dominion over your heart and for ever banish from it 
Christian charity? Who is able to inform you, in those fre- 
quent and voluntary infidelities, where, comforted by their pre- 
tended insignificancy, you oppose the internal grace which en- 
deavours to turn you from them; you continually act contrary 
to your own reason and judgment; whether this internal con- 
tempt of the voice of God; this formal and daily abuse of your 
own lights and grace from God, be not an outrage upon the 
divine goodness; a criminal contempt of his gifts; a wickedness 
in your deviations from virtue, which leaves no excuse; and a 
deliberate preference to your passions and yourselves over Jesus 
Christ, which can alone proceed from a heart where the love of 
all order and righteousness is extinguished? Who can tell you, 
if, in these recollections where your listless mind has a thou- 
sand times dwelt upon objects or events dangerous to modesty, 
your indolence in combating them has not been criminal; 
and if the efforts which you afterwards made, were not an 
artifice of self-love, in order to disguise their criminality, and 
quiet you on the indulgence you had already yielded to your 
crimes? Who would dare to determine, if, in these secret 
antipathies and animosities, which you give yourselves but little 
trouble to restrain, (and that always more for the sake of ap- 
pearances than through piety,) you have never exceeded that 
slippery line beyond which dwell hatred and death to the soul ! 
If, in that excess of sensibility, which in general accompanies 
all your afflictions, infirmities, losses, and disgraces, those 
which you call feelings, attached and inevitable to nature, are 
not irregularities of the heart, and a revolt against the decrees 
of Providence? If, in all those attentions and eagernesses with 
which we see you occupied, to manage either the interests of 
your worldly affairs, or the preservation of a vain beauty, there 



60 



STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. IV. 



is not either as much forwardness as may amount to the crime 
of illegal ambition, or complaisance for yourself, and desire of 
pleasing, as may sully your heart with the guilt of sensuality? 
Great God ! who has well discerned, as thy servant Job formerly 
remarked, the fatal limits which separate life from death, and 
light from darkness, in the heart; these are the gulfs and 
abysses over which mankind, little instructed in them, must 
tremble; and of which Thou reservest the manifestation till the 
terrible day of thy vengeance shall arrive. Second reason, 
drawn from the uncertainty of the rules, which leaves the state 
of a lukewarm soul very suspicious, and even renders it incapa- 
ble of knowing itself. 

But a final reason, which to me appears still more decisive, 
and more dreadful to the lukewarm soul, is there not being an 
appearance from which we can presume that it still preserves 
the sanctifying grace : on the contrary, every thing induces us 
to suppose it forfeited; that is to say, that, of all the symptoms 
of a habitual and living charity, there is not a vestige of one in it. 

For, my brethren, the first character of charity is to fill us 
with that spirit of adoption in children, which leads us to love 
God as our heavenly Father, to love his law, and the justice of 
his commandments; and to dread the forfeiture of his love 
more than all the evils with which he threatens us. 

Now, the attention alone with which a lukewarm soul ex- 
amines whether an offence be venial, or extends further; of 
disputing with God every article he may refuse Mm, without 
actual guilt; of studying the law, only for the purpose of know- 
ing to what degree it may be violated; of unceasingly preferring 
the interests of his own cupidity to those of grace; and always 
justifying those things which flatter the passions, in opposition 
to the rules which check or forbid them; this attention, I say, 
can only proceed from a heart destitute of faith and charity; 
from a heart in which the spirit of God, that spirit of love and 
kindness, apparently no longer reigns. For no children but 
the prodigal are capable of quibbling in this manner with their 
father and protector; of exercising to the utmost length of severi- 
ty any claims they may have, and of seizing all they may think 
themselves entitled to. 

Now, in order to give this reflection all its weight: That 
disposition, which deliberately allows itself every infidelity, 
which will not, it believes, be followed by eternal punishment, 
is the disposition, of a slave and hireling; that is to say, that, 
could they promise themselves the same impunity and indulgence 
from the Almighty, for the transgression of the essential points 
of the law, they would violate them with the same indifference 
as they violate the least; for, were cruel and avowed revenge, 
calumny of the blackest nature, and criminal attachments, 
to be attended in futurity with no worse consequences than 
slight and momentary resentments, accidental and careless evil- 



Serm. IV.] STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 61 



speaking, or too much self-love, they would feel no more hor- 
ror in the commission of the former than the last-mentioned 
crimes; that is to say, that when faithful to the commandments, 
it is not from a love of righteousness, but the dread of that 
punishment which would attend their infraction; it is not to 
order and to the law that they submit themselves, it is to their 
chastisement; it is not the Lord they have in view, it is them- 
selves: For, while his glory alone is interested, and no serious 
consequences may be expected to follow our infidelities, from 
their apparent slightness, we are not afraid of displeasing him; 
we even justify to ourselves in secret these kinds of transgres- 
sions, by saying, that, notwithstanding they offend, and are dis- 
pleasing to the Lord) yet they bring not death nor eternal pu- 
nishment to the soul: We are not affected by what regards 
only him; his glory goes for nothing in the distinction we make 
betwixt actions allowed or forbidden; our interest alone regu- 
lates our fidelity; and nothing can warm our coldness but the 
dread of everlasting punishment. We are even delighted at the 
impunity of those trivial transgressions; of being able to grati- 
fy our inclinations, without any greater misfortune attending, 
than the displeasure of the Almighty: We love this wretched 
liberty, which seems to leave us the right of being unpunished, 
though unfaithful: We are the apologists of it; we carry it 
even further than in reality it goes: We wish all to be venial; 
gaming, dress, sensual pleasures, passion, animosities, public 
spectacles; what shall I say? we would wish this freedom to be 
universal; that nothing which gratifies our appetites should be 
punished; that the Almighty were neither just, nor the avenger 
of iniquity; and that we might yield ourselves up to the grati- 
fication of every passion, and violate the sanctity of his law, 
without any dread of the severity of his justice. Provided a 
lukewarm soul will descend to an examination of itself, it will 
feel, that this is truly the principle of its heart, and its real 
disposition. 

Now, I ask you, is this the situation of a soul in which the 
sanctifying charity and grace is still preserved; that is to say, 
a soul which loves its Maker more than the world, more than 
all created beings, more than all pleasures or riches, more than 
itself? Of a soul which can feel no joy but in his possession; 
which dreads only his loss; and knows no misfortune but that 
of his displeasure? Does the charity you flatter yourselves 
still to preserve, seek, in this manner, its proper interest? Does 
it regard, as nothing, the displeasure of him it loves, provided 
its infidelities remain unpunished? Does it think of disputing, 
like you, every day, to what degree it may safely offend him, 
in order to take its measures accordingly, and then allow itself 
every transgression to which impunity is attached? Does it 
see nothing amiable in its God, or capable of attaching the heart, 
but his chastisements? Were he not even an Almighty and 



62 



STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. IV. 



an avenging God, would it be less affected by his infinite mercies, 
his truth, holiness, wisdom, fatherly tenderness, and protection? 
Ah lukewarm and infidel soul! Thou lovest him no longer, 
Thou lovest, thou livest only for thyself. The small remains 
of fidelity, which still keep thee from sin, are nothing but a 
fund of sloth, timidity, and self-love. Thou wishest to live in 
peace with thyself: Thou dreadest the embarrassments of a pas- 
sion, and the remorse of a sullied conscience; iniquity is become 
a fatigue, and that alone displeases thee with it: Thou lovest 
thine own ease; and that is thy sole religion; Indolence is the 
only barrier which stops thee, and all thy virtue is limited to 
thyself. Assuredly, thou wouldest wish to know whither this 
infidelity be a venial transgression or if it extends further. 
Thou acknowledgest, that it displeases God, (for that point 
admits of no doubt), yet is that not sufficient to turn thee from it? 
Thou wouldest wish to know, whether it so far displeases him 
as to provoke his everlasting wrath? Ah! thou seest very well, 
that this investigation tends to nothing by thyself; that thy 
disposition leads thee to think guilt nothing, as an offence and 
a displeasure to God; a powerful reason, however, why it should 
be detestable to thee: That thou no longer servest the Lord in 
truth and in charity; that thy pretended virtue is only a natural 
timidity, which dare not expose itself to the terrible threatenings 
of the law; that thou art nothing but a vile and wretched slave, 
to restrain whom, it is necessary to keep scourges continually 
in thy sight; that thou resemblest that unfaithful servant, who 
secreted his talent, because he knew that his master was se- 
vere; and, but for that reason, would have wasted it in dissipa- 
tion; and that in the preparation of the heart, to which alone 
the Almighty looketh, thou hatest his law: Thou lovest every 
thing it forbids : Thou art no longer in charity : Thou art a child 
of death and perdition. 

The second character of charity is to be timorous, and to 
magnify to ourselves our smallest deviations; not that charity 
deceiA^es or conceals from us the truth, but, disengaging the 
soul from the senses, it purifies our view of faith, and renders 
it more quick-sighted in spiritual affairs; and besides, whatever 
is in the smallest degree displeasing to the only object of our 
love, appears serious and considerable to the soul which loves. 
Thus charity is always humble, timid, and distrustful of itself; 
unceasingly agitated by its pious perplexities, which leave it in 
suspense respecting its real states always alarmed by those de- 
licacies of grace, which make it tremble at every action; which 
make a kind of martyrdom of love, from the uncertainty in 
which they leave it; and by which, however, it is purified. 
These are not the vain and puerile scruples which we blame in 
weak minds : They are those pious fears of charity and of grace 
inseparable from every faithful and religious soul: It works its 
salvation with fear and trembling; and even frequently regards 



Serm. IV.] STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 63 



as crimes actions which are often virtues in the sight of God; 
and which, at most, can only be regarded as simple weaknesses. 

These are the holy perplexities of charity, which derive their 
source even from the lights of faith. This path has, in all ages, 
been the path of the just. 

Yet nevertheless it is that pretended charity, of which, in the 
midst of a vicious life, and of all your infidelities, you believe 
yourselves still possessed, that makes them appear slight to you: 
It is that charity itself, which you suppose not to have lost, 
that comforts and encourages you; that diminishes your faults 
in your own sight, and fixes you in a state of peace and securi- 
ty: In a word, that not only banishes from your heart all those 
pious alarms inseparable from real piety, but makes you regard 
them as weaknesses, and even the excesses of piety. Now tell 
me, I beg of you, is not that an inconsistency? Does charity 
contradict itself in that manner? Or can you place much de- 
pendence on a love which so nearly resembles hatred? 

The last character of charity is to be active and diligent in 
the ways of God. We find how much the apostle dwells on its 
activity and fecundity in the heart of a Christian: It operates 
wherever it is; it cannot, say the saints, be idle: It is a celes- 
tial fire, which no power can hinder from showing itself, and 
from acting: It may sometimes indeed be overwhelmed, and 
greatly weakened, by the multitude of our weaknesses, but, 
while not entirely extinguished, there always proceed from it, 
as I may say, some sparks of sighs, wishes, lamentations, ef- 
forts, and deeds. The Holy Sacrament re-animates it; prayer 
arouses it; pious reading, affliction, disgrace, bodily infirmity, 
all rekindle it, when not utterly extinguished. It is mention- 
ed in the second book of the Maccabees, that the sacred fire, 
which the Jews had concealed during their captivity, was found 
at their return apparently extinct. But as the surface alone 
was obscured, and the sacred fire still internally preserved all 
its virtue, scarcely was it exposed to the rays of the sun, when 
they saw it instantaneously rekindle, and present to their sight 
a brightness altogether new, and an activity altogether astonish- 
ing- 

Behold, my brethren, a faithful representation of the coldness 
of a truly just soul; and which likewise would be your case, 
had the multitude of your infidelities done no more than cover 
and relax, as I may say, without extinguishing, the sacred fire 
of charity within you: Behold, I say, what ought to be your 
situation, when you approach the Holy Sacrament, or listen to 
the word of God. When Jesus Christ, the Sun of righteous- 
ness, darts upon you some rays of his grace and light, and in- 
spires you with holy desires, your heart ought then to be seen 
rekindled, and your fervour renewed; you ought then to ap- 
pear all fire and animation in the practice of your duty, and 



64 



STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. IV. 



astonish even the most confident witnesses of your former life 
by the renovation of your morals and zeal. 

Alas! nothing, however, reanimates you. Even the Holy 
Sacrament leaves you all your coldness: The words of the 
gospel, which you listen to, fall upon your heart like corn upon 
a sterile land, where it immediately dies: the sentiments of sal- 
vation which grace operates within you, are never followed 
with any effect in the melioration of your morals; you conti- 
nually drag on in the same indolence and langour; you depart 
from the holy altar equally cold, equally insensible, as you ap- 
proached it : We are not in you these renewals of zeal, piety, 
and fervour, so common in just souls, and of which the motives 
are to be found in their deviations from duty. What you were 
yesterday, you are to-day; the same infidelities, the same weak- 
nesses; you advance not a single step in the road to salvation; 
all the fire of heaven could scarcely rekindle in the bottom of 
your heart this pretended charity upon which you depend so 
much. Ah ! my dear hearer, how much I dread that it is ex- 
tinct, and that you are dead in the sight of the Lord ! I wish 
not to anticipate the secret judgments of God upon the con- 
sciences; but I must tell you, that your state is very far from 
being safe; I even tell you, that, if we are to judge by the rules 
of faith, you are in disgrace with, and hated of the Lord ; I tell 
you likewise, that, a coldness so durable and constant cannot 
subsist with a principle of heavenly and eternal life, which al- 
ways, from time to time at least, betrays external movements 
and signs, raises, animates itself, and takes wing, as if to disen- 
gage itself from the shackles which weigh it down; and that a 
charity so mute, so indolent, and so constantly insensible, ex- 
ists no more. 

But the great danger of this state, my brethren, is, that a 
lukewarm soul is so without scruple; it feels that it might carry 
its fervour and fidelity to a much greater length, but it looks 
upon that zeal, and that exactitude, as a perfection and a grace 
reserved only for certain souls, and not as a general duty. In 
this manner they fix themselves in that degree of coldness into 
which they are fallen; they have not made, nor scarcely at- 
tempted, the smallest progress in virtue, since the first ardours 
of conversion. It would appear, that, having exhausted all their 
fervour against the criminal passions with which they had at 
first to combat, they imagine that nothing now remains but to 
enjoy in peace the fruits of their victory; a thousand damages 
which still remain from their first shipwreck they think no 
more of repairing: So far from endeavouring to repress a thou- 
sand weaknesses any corrupted inclinations left them by their 
first irregularities, they love and cherish them. The Holy Sa- 
crament no longer reanimates or invigorates their faith; it 
only amuses it. Conversion is no longer the end they propose; 
they believe it already done: And, alas! their confessions, 



Serm. IV.] STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 65 



even to the Almighty, are more for the purpose of amusing and 
lulling their consciences, than the effects of piety and real con- 
trition. 

We impose greatly upon ourselves, my brethren, with regard 
to our consciences reproaching us with nothing criminal; for 
we see not, that it is even that tranquillity which constitutes 
the danger, and perhaps the guilt likewise of it. We believe 
ourselves in security in our state, because it perhaps offers to 
our sight more innocence and regularity than that of disorderly 
souls; and indeed, we wish not to conceive how a life purely* 
natural should not be a life of grace and of faith; or that a 
state of habitual idleness, and sensual gratification, should be a 
state of sin and death in a Christian life. 

Thus, my dear hearer, you whom this discourse regards, re- 
animate yourself without ceasing in the spirit of your vocation; 
according to the advice of the apostles, raise yourself every day 
by prayer, by mortification of the sense, by vigilance over your 
passions, and by a continual retrospection to, and investigation 
of your own heart, — that first grace, which operates to draw you 
from the errors and wanderings of the world, and make you en- 
ter into the paths of God. Depend upon it, that piety has no- 
thing sure or consoling but fidelity; that, in relaxing from it, 
you only augment your troubles, because you multiply your 
txmds; that in retrenching from your duty, zeal, fervour, and 
exactitude, you likewise retrench all its sweets and pleasures; 
that in depriving your state of fidelity, you deprive it of securi- 
ty; and that, in limiting yourself simply to shun iniquity, you 
lose the most precious fruits of virtue. 

And after all, since you have already sacrificed the essential, 
why will you still attach yourselves to the frivolous parts? Af- 
ter having accomplished the most laborious and painful exer- 
tions towards salvation, must you perish for not finishing the 
slightest and most easy? When Naaman, little convinced, be- 
cause the prophet, for the cure of his leprosy, had only ordered 
him to bathe in the waters of the Jordan, retired full of con- 
tempt for the man of God, and believing it impossible that his 
recovery could be accomplished by so simple a remedy, the 
people who accompanied him made him sensible of his error, by 
saying to him, 44 But, master, had the prophet bid thee do 
some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much 
rather, then, when he saith to thee, Wash and be clean?" 

And now, my brethren, attend to what I have to say, while 
I finish this discourse. You have abandoned the world, and 
the idols which you formerly worshipped in it; you are come 
from afar into the paths of God; you have had so many pas- 
sions to overcome, and obstacles to surmount, so many things to 
sacrifice, and difiicult exertions to make, there remains only one 
step more to accomplish, which is a faithful and constant vigi- 
lance over yourselves. If a sacrifice of the criminal passions 

E 



66 



STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. V. 



were not already made, and you were required to do it, you 
would not, I believe, hesitate a moment; cost what it might, 
you would make it : And, in the mean while, when simple pu- 
rifications are only demanded of you; nay, when you are re- 
quired, as I may say, almost the same things which you do, hut 
only to be practised with more fervour, fidelity, faith, and vigi- 
lance, are you excusable in declining them? Why will you 
render useless all your former efforts, by the refusal of a tiling 
so easy? Why should you have renounced the world, and all 
its criminal pleasures, only to find in piety the same rock, 
which by flying from sin you thought to. have escaped? And 
would it not be lamentable, if, after having sacrificed to God 
the principal parts, you should lose yourselves, by wishing still 
to dispute with him a thousand little sacrifices, much less pain- 
ful to the heart and to nature? 

Finish, then, in us, O my God ! that which thy grace has 
already begun; triumph over our languors and our weaknesses, 
since thou hast already triumphed over our crimes; give us a 
heart fervent and faithful, since thou hast already deprived us 
of a criminal and corrupted one; inspire us with that willing 
submission which the just possess, since thou hast extinguished 
in us that pride and obstinacy which occasion so many sinners: 
Leave not, O my God! thy work unfinished; and, since thou 
hast already made us enter into the holy career of salvation, 
render us worthy of the holy crown promised to those who shall 
have legally fought for it. 

Now to God, &c. Amen, 



SERMON V. 

THE CERTAINTY OF THE LOSS OF RIGHTEOUS- 
NESS IN A STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 

Luke iv. 38. 

And he rose up out of the Synagogue, and entered into Simon's house: 
and Simon's wife's mother was taken with a great fever ; and they 
besought him for her. 

Since Simon thought the presence of our Saviour necessary for 
the cure of his mother-in-law, it would appear, my brethren, 
that the evil was pressing, and threatened an approaching 
death; the usual remedies must have been found ineffectual, 
and nothing but a miracle could operate her cure, and draw her 



Serm. V.] state of lukewarmness. 



67 



from the gates of death ; nevertheless, the Scriptures mention 
her being attacked by only a common fever. On every other 
occasion, we never find that they had recourse to our Saviour, 
but to raise people from the grave, to cure paralytics, restore 
sight to the blind, and hearing to the deaf, from their birth : 
In a word, to cure diseases incurable by any other than the so- 
vereign Master of life and death: In this instance he is called 
upon to restore health to a person attacked by a simple fever. 

Whence comes it that the Almighty power is employed on so 
slight an occasion ? It is, that this fever, being a natural image 
of lukewarmness in the ways of God, the Holy Spirit has wish- 
ed to make us understand by it, that this disease, apparently so 
slight, and of which they dread not the danger, — this lukewarm- 
ness, so common in piety, is a disease which inevitably destroys 
the soul, and that a miracle is necessary to rescue it from death. 

Yes, my brethren, of all the maxims of Christian morality, 
there is none upon which experience allows us less to deceive 
ourselves, than the one which assures us, that contempt for the 
smallest points of our duty insensibly leads us to a transgres- 
sion of the most essential; and that negligence in the ways of 
God is never far from a total loss of righteousness* He who 
despises the smaller objects of religion, says the Holy Spirit, 
will gradually fall; he who despises them, that is to say, who 
deliberately violates them; who lays down, as it were, a plan 
of this conduct; for if, through weakness or surprise, you fail 
in them sometimes, it is the common destiny of the just, and 
this discourse would no longer regard you; but to despise 
them in the sense already mentioned, which can happen only 
with lukewarm and unfaithful souls, is a path which must ter- 
minate in the loss of righteousness. In the first place, because 
the special grace necessary towards perseverance in virtue is no 
longer granted. Secondly, Because the passions are strength- 
ened which lead us on to vice. Thirdly, Because all the exter- 
nal succours of piety become useless. 

Let us investigate these three reflections : They contain im- 
portant instructions in the detail of a Christian life: Useful, 
not only to those who make profession of a public and avowed 
piety, but likewise to those who make all virtue to consist in 
that regularity of conduct and propriety of behaviour which 
even the world requires. 

Part I. — It is a truth of salvation, says a holy father, that 
the innocence of even the most upright has occasion for the con- 
tinual assistance of grace. Man, delivered up to sin by the 
wickedness of his nature, no longer finds in himself but princi- 
ples of error and sources of corruption: Righteousness and 
truth, originally born with us, are now become as strangers; 
all our inclinations, revolted against God and his law in spite of 
ourselves, drag' us on towards illicit objects; in so much, that, 



68 



STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. V. 



to return to the law, and submit our heart to order, it is neces- 
sary to resist, without ceasing, the impressions of the senses; to 
break our warmest inclinations, and to harden ourselves conti- 
nually against ourselves. There is no duty but what now costs 
us something; no precept in the law but combats some of our 
passions; no step in the paths of God against which our heart 
does not revolt. 

To this load of corruption, which renders duty so difficult 
and irksome, and iniquity so natural, add the snares which sur- 
round us, the examples which entice us, the objects which ef- 
feminate us, the occasions which surprise us, the compliances 
which weaken us, the afflictions which discourage us, the pro- 
perties which corrupt us, the situations which blind us, and the 
contradictions which we experience; every thing around us is 
indeed only one continued temptation. I speak not of the mi- 
series which are natural to us, or the particular opposition to 
order and righteousness, which our past morals, and our first 
passions, have left in our hearts; that love for the world and 
its pleasures; that dislike to virtue and its maxims; that em- 
pire of the senses, fortified by a voluptuous life; that invincible 
indolence, to which every thing is a burden, and to which what- 
ever is a 'burden becomes almost impossible; that pride, which 
knows neither how to bend nor break; that inconstancy of heart, 
incapable of end or uniformity, which presently tires of itself; 
which cannot submit to rule, because that is always the same; 
which wishes, and wishes not; passes in a moment from the 
lowest state of dejection to a vain and childish joy, and leaves 
scarcely the interval of a moment betwixt the sincerest resolu- 
tion and the infidelity which violates it. 

Now, in a situation so miserable, what, O my God ! can the 
most just accomplish, delivered up to his own weakness and all 
the snares which surround him; bearing in his heart the source 
of all his errors, and in his mind the principles of every illu- 
sion? The grace of Jesus Christ, therefore, can alone deliver 
him from so many miseries; enlighten him in the midst of so 
much darkness; support him under so many difficulties; re- 
strain him from following the dictates of so many rapid desires, 
and strengthen him against so many attacks. If left a moment 
to himself, he inevitably stumbles, and is lost. If an Almighty 
hand ceases an instant to retain him, he is carried down by the 
stream. Our consistency in virtue is therefore a continual 
grace and miracle; all our steps in the ways of God are new 
motions of the Holy Spirit; that is to say, of that invisible 
guide which impels and leads us on. All our pious actions are 
gifts of divine mercy; since every proper use of our liberty 
comes from him, and he crowns his gifts in recompensing our 
merits: All the moments of our Christian life are like a new 
creation, therefore, in faith, and in piety; that is to say, (this 
spiritual creation does not suppose a non-existence in the just, 



Serm. V.] STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 69 



but a principle of grace, and a liberty which co-operates with 
it,) that as, in the order of nature, we should again return to 
our nonenity, if the Creator ceased an instant to preserve the 
being he has given us; in the life of grace, we would again fall 
into sin and death, did the Redeemer cease a single moment to 
continue, by new succours, the gift of righteousness and holi- 
ness, with which he had embellished our soul. Such is the 
weakness of man, and such is his continual dependence on the 
grace of Jesus Christ. The fidelity of the just soul is therefore 
the fruit of continual aids of grace; but it is likewise the prin- 
ciple. It is grace alone which can operate the fidelity of the 
just; and it is the fidelity alone of the just which merits the 
preservation and increase of grace in the heart. 

For, my brethren, the ways of God toward us being full of 
equity and wisdom, there must necessarily be some order in the 
distribution of his gifts and grace . The Lord must communi- 
cate himself more abundantly to the soul which faithfully pre- 
pares its heart for his ways; he must bestow more continual 
marks of his protection and mercy on the upright heart which 
gives him constant proof of love and fidelity; and the servant 
who improves his talent, must necessarily be recompensed in 
proportion to the profits he has known how to reap from it. It 
is just, on the contrary, that a lukewarm and unfaithful heart, 
who serves his God with negligence and disgust, should find 
the Almighty cold and disgusted towards him. The misery 
inseparable from coldness is therefore the privation of the 
grace of protection. If you become cold, the Almighty becomes 
so towards you; if you limit yourself, with regard to him, to 
those essential duties which you cannot refuse him without 
guilt, he confines himself, with regard to you, to those general 
succours which will not support you far. He retires from you 
in proportion as you retire from him; and the measure of fi- 
delity with which you serve him, is the measure of protection 
you may expect to receive. 

Nothing can be more equitable than this conduct: for you 
enter into judgment with your God. You neglect every oppor- 
tunity where you might give him proofs of your fidelity: You 
dispute every thing with him, of which you think you could 
avoid the payment: You carefully watch lest you do any thing 
for him beyond what duty requires. It appears you say to him, 
what he formerly said to the unfaithful servant, Take that thine 
is, and go thy way. You reckon with God, as I may say: All 
your attention is engaged, in prescribing limits to the right he 
has over your heart; and all his attention likewise, if I may be 
permitted to speak in this manner, is to put bounds to his mer- 
cies to your soul, and to pay your indifference with the same. 
Love is the price of love alone; and if you do not sufficiently 
feel all the terror and extent of this truth, allow me to explain 
to you its consequences. 



STATE OF LUKEWARMNES8. [Serm. V. 



Th<e first is, that this state of lukewarmness and infidelity re- 
moving the soul from the grace of protection, leaves him, as I 
may say, empty of God, and in the hands, as it were, of his 
own weakness. He may undoubtedly, with the .common suc- 
cours left him, still preserve the fidelity he owes to God. He 
has always enough to support him in well-doing; but his luke- 
warmness deprives him of the ability to apply them to any pur- 
pose; that is to say, that he is still aided by those succours 
which may enable him to go on; but no longer by those with 
which he may infallibly persevere; there is no peril, therefore, 
in this situation but makes a dangerous impression upon him 
and leads him to the brink of ruin. 

I grant, that a happy natural disposition, some remains of 
modesty, and fear of God, a conscience still afraid of guilt, and 
a reputation to preserve, may for some time defend him against 
himself; but as these resources, drawn mostly from nature, 
cannot extend far; as the sensual objects, in the midst of which 
he lives, make every day new wounds in the heart, and grace, 
less abundant, repairs not the loss, — alas ! his strength exhausts 
every moment, faith relaxes, and truth is obscured; the more 
he advances, the worse he becomes: Such souls feel perfectly, 
that they no longer retire from the world and its dangers, 
equally innocent as formerly; that they carry their weaknesses 
and compliance much farther; that they encroach upon limits 
which they formerly respected; that loose conversations find 
them more indulgent, evil speaking more favourable, pleasure 
less guarded, and the world more anxious for it; that they 
bring into it a heart already half-gained; that they are sensible 
cf their losses, but feel nothing to repair them: in a word, that 
God is almost withdrawn from them, and there is no longer 
any barrier but their own weakness, betwixt guilt and them. 
Behold the situation in which you are, and from that judge of 
the one in which you will soon fyejl 

I know that this state of relaxation and infidelity troubles 
and disturbs you; that you say every day, that nothing can be- 
stow greater happiness than a detachment from every thing 
worldly; and that you envy the destiny of those Christians, 
who give themselves up to God without reserve, and no longer 
keep any terms with the world. But you are deceived: it is 
not the faith or the fervour of these faithful Christians you 
envy; you only covet their lot, that happiness and peace which 
they enjoy in the service of their Master, and which you are in- 
capable of partaking; you only envy them that insensibility 
and happy indifference to which they have attained for the 
world and every thing it esteems, your love for which occasions 
all your troubles, remorses, and secret anguish; but you envy 
them not the sacrifices they were under the necessity of making, 
to arrive at their present state of peace and tranquillity; you 
envy them not the trials they have undergone, in order to me- 



Serm. V.] state of lukewakmness. 



n 



rit the precious gift of a lively and fervent faith: you envy the 
happiness of their state, but you would not wish it to cost you 
the illusion and sensuality of your own. 

The second consequence I draw from the refusal of the grace 
of protection to the lukewarm Christian, is, that the yoke of our 
Saviour to him, becomes burdensome, hard, and insupportable. 
For, my brethren, by the irregularity of our nature, having lost 
all taste for righteousness and truth, which, in a state of inno- 
cence, formed the happiness of man, we no longer have any 
feeling or desire but for objects which gratify the senses and 
passions. The duties of the law of God, which recall us from 
the senses to the spirit, and make us sacrifice the present im- 
pressions of pleasure to the hope of future promises: These du- 
ties, I say, presently fatigue our weakness, because they are 
continual efforts we make against ourselves. It requires the 
unction of grace, therefore, to soften the yoke; it is necessary 
that grace spread secret consolations over its bitterness, and 
change the sadness of duty into a holy and sensible joy. Now 
the lukewarm soul, deprived of this unction, feels only the 
weight of the yoke, without the consolations which soften it: 
In this manner, all the duties of piety and religion become in- 
sipid to you; works of salvation become wearisome; your con- 
science, restless and embarrassed by your relaxations and infi- 
delities, of which you cannot justify the innocence, no longer 
allows you to enjoy either peace or joy in the service of God. 
You feel all the weight of the duties to which some remains of 
faith, and love of ease, hinder you from being unfaithful; but 
you feel not the secret testimony of a clear conscience, which 
soothes and supports the fervent Christian: You shun, per- 
haps, certain occasions of pleasure, where innocence is sure of 
being shipwrecked; but you only experience, in the retreat 
which divides you from them, a wearisomeness, and a more 
lively desire for the same pleasure from which you have forced 
} r ourself to refrain. You pray, but prayer is no longer but a 
fatigue; you frequent the society of virtuous persons, but their 
company becomes so irksome as almost to disgust you with 
virtue itself: The slightest violence you do upon your inclina- 
tions for the sake of heaven, costs you such efforts that the 
pleasures and amusements of the world must be applied to, to 
refresh and invigorate you after this fatigue; the smallest mor- 
tification exhausts your body, casts uneasiness and chagrin 
through your temper, and only consoles you by an immediate 
determination to abandon its practice. You live unhappy, and 
without consolation, because you deprive yourself of a world 
you love, and substitute in its place duties which you love not; 
your whole life is but a melancholy fatigue, and a perpetual dis- 
gust with yourself; you resemble the Israelites in the desart, 
disgusted, on the one part, with the manna upon whicli the 
Lord had ordered them to subsist, and, on the other, not daring 



12 



STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. V. 



to return to the food of the Egyptians, which they still loved, 
and which the dread alone of the Almighty's anger induced 
them to deny themselves. Now, this state of violence cannot 
endure; we soon tire of any remains of virtue which "do not 
quiet the heart, comfort the reason, and even flatter our self- 
love; we soon throw off the remains of a yoke which weighs 
us down, and which we no longer carry through love, but for 
decency's sake. It is so melancholy to be nothing at all, as I 
may say; neither just nor worldly; attached neither to the 
world nor to Jesus Christ; enjoying neither the pleasures of 
the senses, nor those of grace, — that it is impossible this weari- 
some situation of indifference and neutrality can be durable. 
The heart, and particularly those of a certain description, re- 
quires an avowed object to occupy and interest it; if not God, 
it will soon be the world; a heart, lively, eager, always in ex- 
tremes, and such as the generality of men possess, cannot be 
fixed but by the feelings; and to be continually disgusted with 
virtue, shows a heart already prepared to yield to the attrac- 
tions of vice. 

I know, in the first place, That there are lazy and indolent 
souls, who seem to keep themselves in this state of equilibration 
and insensibility; who offer nothing decided, either for the world 
or virtue; who appear equally distant, by their dispositions, either 
from the ardours of a faithful piety or the excesses of profane 
guilt; who, in the midst of the pleasures of the world, preserve 
a fund of retention and regularity which proves the existence 
of some remains of virtue; and, in the midst of their religious 
duties, a fund of carelessness and laxity which still breathes 
the air and maxims of the world. These are indolent and tran- 
quil hearts, animated in nothing, in whom indolence almost 
supplies the place of virtue, and who, notwithstanding they 
never arrive at that degree of piety which the faithful accom- 
plish, never proceed to those lengths in iniquity which criminal 
and abandoned souls do. 

I know it, my brethren but I likewise know, that this indo- 
lence of heart defends us only from crimes which would cost us 
trouble, makes us avoid only those pleasures which we would 
be obliged to purchase at the expense of our tranquillity, and 
which the love of ease alone prevents us from enjoying. It 
leaves us virtuous only in the eyes of men, who confound the 
indolence which dreads embarrassment with the piety which 
flies from vice; but it does not defend us against ourselves, 
against a thousand illicit desires, a thousand criminal com- 
pliances, a thousand passions, more secret and less painful be- 
cause shut up in the heart; from jealousies, which devour us; 
ambition, which domineers over us; pride, which corrupts us; 
a desire of pleasure, which engrosses us; an excess of self-love, 
which is the principle of all our conduct, and infects all our ac- 
tions; that is to say, that this indolence delivers up our heart 



Serm. V.] STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 73 



to all its weaknesses, at the same time that it serves as a check 
against the most striking and tumultuous passions, and that 
what appears only indolence in the eyes of men, is always be- 
fore God a secret ignominy and corruption. 

I know, in the second place, That this love of piety, and this 
unction which softens the practice of religious duties, is a gift 
frequently refused even to holy and faithful Christians. But 
there are three essential differences betwixt the faithful soul, to 
whom the Lord denies the sensible consolations of piety, and 
the lukewarm and worldly one, whom the weight of the yoke 
oppresses, and who is incapable of enjoying the things of God. 

The first is, That a faithful Christian, in spite of his repug- 
nancies, preserving a firm and solid faith, finds his state, and 
the exemption from guilt in which he lives, since touched by 
God, a thousand times more happy than that in which he lived 
when delivered up to his passions; and, penetrated with horror 
at his former excesses, he would not change his lot, or re-en- 
gage himself in his former vices, for all the pleasures of the 
earth: In place of which, the lukewarm and unfaithful heart, 
disgusted with virtue, enviously regards the pleasures and vain 
happiness of the world; and his disgusts being only the conse- 
quence and sufferings of his weakness and the lukewarmness of 
his faith, to plunge into sin begins to appear as the only resource 
left him from weariness and the gloominess of piety. 

The second difference is, That the faithful Christian, in the 
midst of his disgusts and hardships, at least bears a conscience 
which reproaches him not with guilt: He at least is supported 
by the testimony of his own heart, and by a certain degree of 
internal peace, which, though neither warm nor very sensible, 
fails not, however, to establish within us a calm which we never 
experienced in the paths of error: On the contrary, the luke- 
warm and unfaithful soul, allowing himself, against the testi- 
mony of his own conscience, a thousand daily transgressions, of 
which he knows not the wickedness, bears always an uneasy 
and suspicious conscience; and being no longer sustained by 
love for his duties, nor the peace and testimony of his conscience, 
this state of agitation and weariness soon terminates in the mi- 
serable peace of sin. 

The last reason is, That the disgusts of the faithful Christian 
being only trials, to which, for his purification, God exposes 
him, he supplies, in a thousand ways, the sensible consolations 
of virtue which he refuses him; he replaces them by a more 
powerful protection, by a merciful attention to remove every 
danger which might seduce him, and by more abundant succours 
of grace; for the Almighty wishes neither to lose nor discour- 
age him; he wishes only to prove him, and make him expiate, by 
the afflictions and hardships of virtue, the unjust pleasures of sin : 
But the disgusts of an infidel soul are not trials, they are pun- 
ishments; it is not a merciful God who suspends the conso- 



74 



STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. V. 



lations of grace, without suspending grace itself; it is not a ten- 
der father, who supplies, by the solidity of his tenderness, and 
by effectual assistances, the apparent rigours he is under the 
necessity of using: It is a severe judge, who only begins to de- 
prive the criminal of a thousand indulgences, because the sen- 
tence of death is prepared for him. The hardships of virtue 
find a thousand resources in virtue itself; those of lukewarm- 
ness can find them only in the deceitful pleasures of vice. 

Such, my brethren, is the inevitable lot of lukewarmness in 
the ways of God; the misery of losing righteousness. Will you 
tell us, after this, that you wish to practise only a degree of vir- 
tue which may continue; that these great exertions of zeal can- 
not be supported; that it is much better not to begin so high, 
and by these means tc accomplish the end; and that they never 
go far who exhaust themselves at the beginning of their journey? 

I know, that every excess, even in piety, comes not from the 
Spirit of God, which is a spirit of wisdom and discretion; that 
the zeal which overturns the order of our state and duties, is 
not the piety which comes from above, but an illusion born in 
ourselves; that indiscretion is a source of false virtues ; and'that 
we often give to vanity what, we think is given to truth. 

But I tell you from God, that, to persevere in his ways, we 
must give ourselves up to him without reserve: That, in order 
to support the fidelity due to the essential parts of our duty, we 
must unceasingly endeavour to weaken the passions which op- 
pose it; and that keeping ferms with these passions, under the 
pretext of not going too far, is to dig for ourselves a grave. I 
tell you, that it is only the faithful and fervent Christians, 
who, not contented with shunning sin, shun also every thing 
which can lead to it; that it is these alone who persevere, who 
sustain themselves, who honour piety by a supported, equal, 
and uniform conduct and, on the contrary, it is lukewarm and 
relaxed souls, who have begun their penitence by limiting their 
piety, and accommodating it to the pleasures and maxims of 
the world; it is these souls who draw back, who belie them- 
selves, and who dishonour piety, by their inconstancy and in- 
equality of conduct; by a life, sometimes blended with virtue 
and retirement, and at others devoted to the world and weakness : 
And I appeal to yourselves, my brethren, if, when you see 
in the world a person relax from his first fervour, gradually min- 
gle himself in the pleasures and societies he had lately so scru- 
pulously and severely denied himself; insensibly abate his love 
of retirement, his modesty, circumspection, prayers, and exacti- 
tude to fulfil his religious duties, you say not to yourselves, that 
he is not far from returning to what he formerly was? Are not 
these relaxations regarded by you as a prelude to his ruin ; and 
that virtue is nearly extinct, when once you see it weakened? 
Do you even require so much to rouse your censures and mali- 
cious presages against piety? Unjust that you are, you con- 



Serm. V.] state of lukewarmness. 



75 



demn a cold and unfaithful virtue, while you condemn us for 
requiring of you a virtue faithful and fervent! You pretend, 
that, in order to continue, you must begin with moderation, 
while you prophecy that a total departure from virtue is not far 
distant, when once it begins to be followed with coldness and 
negligence ! 

From a relaxation alone, therefore, we are to dread a return 
to our former courses and a departure from virtue: It is not 
by giving ourselves up without reserve to God, that we become 
disgusted with piety and are forsaken by him: The way to 
come gloriously off in battle, is not by sparing, but overcoming 
the enemy: There is no dread, therefore, of doing too much, 
lest we should be unable to support it; on the contrary, to 
merit the grace necessary to our support, we ought, from the 
first, to leave nothing undone. What illusion, my brethren ! 
We dread zeal, as dangerous to perseverance; and it is zeal 
alone which can obtain it: We fix ourselves in a lukewarm and 
commodious life, as the only one which can subsist; and it is 
the only one which proves false: We shun fidelity, as the rock 
of piety; and piety without fidelity is never far from shipwreck. 

It is thus that lukewarmness removes from the infidel soul 
the grace of protection; of which the absence depriving our 
faith of all its strength, and the yoke of Jesus Christ of all its 
consolations, leaves us in a state of such imbecility, that, to be 
lost, innocence requires only to be attacked. But if the loss of 
righteousness is inevitable, on the part of grace which is with- 
drawn, it is still more so on account of the passions which are 
fortified within us. 

Part II. What renders vigilance- so necessary to Christian 
piety, is, that all the passions which oppose themselves in us to 
the law of God, only die, as I may say, with us. We undoubt- 
edly are able to weaken them, by the assistance of grace, and a 
fervent and lively faith; but the roots always continue in the 
heart; we always carry within us the principles of the same 
errors our tears have effaced. Guilt may be extinguished in our 
hearts; but sin, as the Apostle says, that is to say, the corrupt- 
ed inclinations which have formed our guilt, inhabits and lives 
there still: And that fund of corruption which removed us so 
far from God, is still - left us in our penitence, to serve as a con- 
tinual exercise to virtue; to render us, by the continual occa- 
sions of combat it raises up for us, more worthy of an eternal 
crown; to humble our pride; to keep us in remembrance that 
the duration of our present life is a time of war and danger; 
and, by a destiny inevitable to our nature, that there is only 
one step between relaxation and guilt. 

It is true that the grace of Jesus Christ is given us to repress 
these corrupted inclinations which survive our conversion; but 
in a state of lukewarmness, as I have already said, grace offer-' 



76 



STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. V. 



ing us only common succours, and the grace of protection, of 
which we are become unworthy, being either more rare, or en- 
tirely suspended, it is evident that the passions must acquire 
new strength. But I say, that not only the passions are 
strengthened, in a lukewarm and infidel life, because the grace 
of protection which checked them is more rare, but likewise by 
the state itself of relaxation and coldness : for that life being 
only a continued indulgence of all the passions; a simple easi- 
ness in granting, to a certain degree, every thing which flatters 
the appetites; a watchfulness, even of self-love, to remove what- 
ever might repress or restrain them; and a perpetual usage of 
all things capable of inflaming them, — it is evident, that by 
these means they must daily acquire new force. 

In a word, my brethren, we are not to imagine, that, in push- 
ing our indulgence for our passions only to certain lengths 
permitted, we appease them, as I may say, that we allow suf- 
ficient to satisfy them, and not enough to stain our soul, or carry 
trouble and remorse through our conscience; or fancy that we 
can ever attain a certain degree of equilibration betwixt virtue 
and sin, where, on the one side, our passions are satisfied by the 
indulgence allowed them; and, on the other, our conscience is 
tranquil, by the absence of guilt, which we shun. For such is 
the plan adopted by the lukewarm soul: Favourable to his in- 
dolence, because he equally banishes every thing, either in vir- 
tue or in sin, which can disturb him: To the passions, he re- 
fuses whatever might trouble his conscience; and to virtue, 
whatever might be disagreeable to or mortify his self-love: But 
this state of equilibrium is a perfect chimera. The passions 
know no limits or bounds in guilt; how, therefore, could they 
possibly be restrained to those of the lukewarm soul? Even the 
utmost excess cannot restrain or fix them; how, then, could 
simple indulgencies do it? The more you grant, the more you 
deprive yourself of the power to refuse them any thing. The 
true secret of appeasing, is not by favouring them to a certain 
degree; it is by opposing them in every thing; every indulgence 
only renders them more fierce and unmanageable; it is a little 
water thrown upon a great fire, which, far from extinguishing, 
increases its fury: Every thing whieh flatters the passions, 
renders them more keen, and diminishes the probability of be- 
ing able to conquer them. 

Now, such is the state of a lukewarm and unfaithful soul. It 
allows itself every animosity which extends not to avowed re- 
venge: it justifies every pleasure, in which guilt is not palpable; 
it delivers itself up without reserve to every worldly desire and 
gratification, by which no individual, it supposes, is injured; 
every omission, which seems to turn on the arbitrary duties, or 
but slightly interest the essential ones, it makes no scruple of; 
every action of self-love, which leads not directly to guilt, it re- 
gards as nothing; all that nicety, with regard to rank and per- 



Serm. V.] state of lukewarmness. 



sonal fame, which is compatible with that moderation even the 
world requires, it regards as a merit. Now, what happens in 
consequence of this? Listen, and you shall know; and I beg 
you will attend to the following reflections. 

In the first place: All the inclinations within us, which op- 
pose themselves to order and duty, being continually strength- 
ened, order and duty at last find in us insurmountable difficul- 
ties; insomuch, that, to accomplish them on any essential oc- 
casion, or when required by the law of God, is like remounting 
against the stream of a rapid flood, where the current drags us 
down in spite of every effort to the contrary: or like a furious 
and unmanageable horse which it is necessary to stop short on 
the brink of a precipice. Thus your insensibility and pride are 
nourished to such a degree of strength that you abandon your 
heart to all their impressions : Thus your care and anxiety have 
so fortified in your heart the desire of worldly praise, that, on 
any important occasion, where \t would be necessary to sacrifice 
the vanity of its suffrages to duty, and expose yourself, for the 
good of your soul, to its censure and derision, you will always 
prefer the interests of vanity to those of truth, and the opinions 
of men will be much more powerful than the fear of God. Thus 
those anxieties with regard to fortune and advancement have 
rendered ambition so completely sovereign of your heart, that, 
in any delicate conjuncture, where the destruction of a rival 
would be necessary towards your own elevation, you will never 
hesitate, but will sacrifice your conscience to your fortune; and 
be unjust towards your brother, lest you fail towards yourself. 
Thus, in a word, to avoid a long detail, those suspicious attach- 
ments, loose conversations, ridiculous compliances, and desires 
of pleasing, too much attended to, have filled you with disposi- 
tions so nearly allied to guilt and debauchery, that you are no 
longer capable of resistance against any of your attacks; the 
corruption, prepared by the whole train of their past actions, 
will be lighted up in an instant; Your weakness will overcome 
your reflection: Your heart will go against glory, duty, and 
yourself. We cannot long continue faithful, when we find in 
ourselves so many dispositions to be otherwise. 

Thus you will yourself be surprised at your own weakness : 
You will ask at yourself, What are become of all those disposi- 
tions of modesty and virtue, which formerly inspired you with 
such horror at sin? You no longer will know yourself: But this 
state of guilt will gradually appear less frightful to you: The 
heart soon justifies to itself whatever pleases it: Whatever is 
agreeable to us, does not long alarm us; and to the misery of a 
departure from virtue, you will add the misery of ignorance 
and security. 

Such is the inevitable lot of a lukewarm and unfaithful life : 
Passions which we have too much indulged: " Young lions," 
says a prophet, which " have been nourished without precau- 



STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. V. 



tion, at length grow up, and devour the careless hand which 
has even assisted to strengthen and render them formidable :" 
The passions, arrived to a certain point, gain a complete ascen- 
dancy: In vain you then try to regain yourself: The time is 
past; you have fostered the profane fire in your heart, it must 
at last break out; you have nourished the venom within you, it 
must now spread and gain upon you; and the time is past for 
any application for medicine; you should have taken it in time: 
At the commencement the disease was not irremediable; you 
have allowed it to strengthen; you have irritated it by every 
thing which could inflame, and render it incurable: it must 
now be conqueror, and you the victim of your own indiscretion 
and indulgence. 

Do you not likewise say, my brethren, that you have the best 
intentions in the world; that you wish you could act much bet- 
ter than you do; and though you have the sincerest desires for 
salvation, yet a thousand conjunctures happen in life, where we 
forget all our good intentions, and must be saints to resist their 
impressions? This is exactly what we tell you; that, in spite 
of all your pretended good intentions, if you do not fly, struggle, 
watch, pray, and continually take the command over yourself, 
a thousand occasions will occur where you will no longer be 
master of your own weakness: This is what we tell you, that 
nothing but a mortified and watchful life can place us beyond 
the reach of temptation and danger; that it is ridiculous to 
suppose we shall continue faithful, in those moments when vio- 
lently attacked, when we bear a heart weakened, wavering, and 
already on the verge of falling; that none but the house built 
upon a rock can resist the winds and the tempest; and, in 
a word, that we must be holy, and firmly established in virtue, 
to live free from guilt. 

And when I say that we must be holy: Alas! my brethren, 
the most faithful and fervent Christians, with every inclination 
mortified as far as the frailty of our nature will permit; imagi- 
nations purified by prayer, and minds nourished in virtue and 
meditation on the law of God, frequently find themselves in 
such terrible situations that their hearts sink within them; 
their imaginations become troubled and deranged; they see 
themselves in those melancholy agitations where they float for a 
long time betwixt victory and death; and like a vessel strug- 
gling against the waves, in the midst of an enraged ocean, they 
can only look for safety from the Almighty Commander of 
winds and tempests. And you, with a heart already half-se- 
duced, with inclinations at least bordering upon guilt, would 
wish your weakness to be proof against all attacks, and the 
most powerful temptations to find you always tranquil and in- 
accessible? You would wish, with your lukewarm, sensual, and 
worldly morals, that on these occasions your soul should be 
gifted with that strength and faith which even the most tender 



Serm. V.] STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 79 



and watchful piety sometimes cannot give? You would wish 
passions flattered, nourished, and strengthened, to remain tract- 
able, quiet, and cold, in the presence of objects most capable of 
lighting them up ! Those which, after years of austerities, and 
a life devoted to prayer and watching, awake sometimes in a 
moment, far even from danger, and, by melancholy examples, 
make the most upright feel that we never should be off our 
guard, and that the highest point of virtue is sometimes the in- 
stant which precedes a departure from and total loss of it. 
Such is our lot, my brethren, to be quick-sighted only towards 
the dangers which regard our fortune or our life, and not even 
to know those which threaten our salvation. But let us unde- 
ceive ourselves: To shun guilt, something more is required 
than the lukewarmness and indolence of virtue; and vigilance 
is the only mean left us by our Saviour to preserve our inno- 
cence. First reflection. 

A second reflection to be made on this truth is, That the pas- 
sions, daily strengthening in a lukewarm and infidel life, not 
only duty finds in us insurmountable repugnancies, but guilt 
likewise, as I may say, polishes itself; and at last we feel no 
more repugnance to it than to the simplest fault. Indeed, by 
these daily infidelities inseparable from lukewarmness, the heart, 
as if by insensible steps, at last arrives at those dangerous limits, 
which, by a single line, separate life from death, guilt from in- 
nocence, and makes the final step almost without perceiving it, 
only a little way remaining for him to go, and having no oc- 
casion for any new exertion to accomplish it, he does not believe 
he has exceeded his former bounds. He had replenished him- 
self with dispositions so nearly bordering on guilt, that he has 
brought forth iniquity without pain, repugnance, visible move- 
ment, or even perceiving it himself: Similar to a dying person, 
whom the languors of a long and painful malady have so atte- 
nuated, and so nearly approached to his end, that the departing 
sigh resembles those which have preceded it, costs him no great- 
er effort than the others, and even leaves the spectators uncertain 
whether his last moment is come, or if he still breathes : And 
this is what renders the state of a lukewarm and infidel soul still 
more dangerous, that they are commonly dead to grace, without 
knowing it themselves; they become enemies to God, while they 
still live with him as with a friend; they are still in the com- 
merce of holy things, when they have lost the grace which en- 
titles us to approach them. 

Thus, let those souls whom this discourse regards, no longer 
deceive themselves, because they believe to have hitherto avoid- 
ed a gross departure from virtue: their state before God is un- 
doubtedly only more dangerous: perhaps the most formidable 
danger of lukewarmness is, that, already dead in the sight of 
God, they live, in their opinion, without any visible or marked 



80 . STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. V. 

guilt; that they compose themselves tranquilly in death, depend- 
ing on an appearance of life which comforts them; that to the 
danger of their situation they add a false peace, which confirms 
them in this path of illusion and darkness; it is, in a word, that 
the Lord, hy terrible and secret judgments, strikes them with 
blindness, and punishes the corruption of their heart by per- 
mitting them to be ignorant of it. A gross fall from virtue, if 
I may venture to say so, would to them be a mark of the 
goodness and mercy of God: They would then at least open 
their eyes; naked and manifest, guilt would then carry trouble 
and uneasiness through their conscience ; the disease at last dis- 
covered, would perhaps induce them to have recourse to the 
remedy; in place of which, this life, apparently regular, composes 
and calms them, renders useless the example of fervent Chris- 
tians, persuades them that this great fervour is unnecessary; 
that it is much more the effect of temperament than of grace; 
that it is the emotion of zeal, rather than of duty; and makes 
them listen to, as vain exaggerations, all that we say with 
regard to a lukewarm and infidel life. Second reflection. 

In a word, the last reflection to be made on this great truth, 
is, That such is the nature of our heart, always to remain much 
below what it at first proposed. A thousand times we have 
formed pious resolutions; we have projected to carry to a cer- 
tain point the detail of our duties and conduct, but the execu- 
tion has always much diminished from the ardour of our projects, 
and has rested at a degree much below the one to which we wished 
to raise ourselves: Thus, the lukewarm Christian, proposing 
to himself no higher point of virtue than to shun guilt, looking 
precisely to precept, that is to say, to that rigorous and precise 
point of the law, immediately below which is prevarication and 
death, he infallibly rests below, and never reaches that essential 
point which he had proposed to himself: It is, therefore, an in- 
contestable maxim, that we must undertake much to execute 
little, and look very high to attain at least the middle. Now, 
this maxim, so sure with regard even to the most just, is much 
more so with respect to the lukewarm and infidel soul; for cold- 
ness more strongly binding all his ties, and augmenting the weight 
of his corruption and misery, it is principally him who ought to 
take this grand flight, in order to attain at least the lowest de- 
gree; and, in his counsels with himself, propose perfection, if he 
wishes to rest even at the observance of precept. Above all, 
it is to him we may truly say, that, by settling in his mind only 
to shun guilt, loaded as he is with the weight of his coldness 
and infidelities, he will always alight at a place very distant from 
the one he expected to reach; and the line of guilt being imme- 
diately below this commodious and sensual virtue, the very same 
efforts he made, as he thought to shun it, will only serve to con- 
duct him to it. These are reasons, drawn entirely from the 



Serm. V.] STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 81 



weakness the strengthened passions leave to the lukewarm and 
infidel soul; and which inevitably lead it to ruin. 

The only reason, however, you allege to us for persevering in 
this dangerous state, is, that you are weak and totally unable 
to support a more retired, limited, mortified, and perfect man- 
ner of life. But surely, it is because you are weak, that is to 
say, ftdl of disgust for virtue, of love for the world, and of sub- 
jection to your appetites, that a retired and mortified life be- 
comes indispensable. It is because you are weak, that with 
more caution you ought to shun every danger; take a greater 
command over yourself; pray, watch, refuse yourself every im- 
proper gratification, and attain even to holy excesses of zeal and 
fervour, in order to accomplish a barrier against your weakness. 
You are weak? And, because you are weak, you think you are 
entitled to expose yourself more than another; to dread danger 
less; with more tranquillity and indifference to neglect the ne- 
cessary remedies; to allow more to your appetites; to preserve 
a stronger attachment to the world and every thing which can 
corrupt the heart? What illusion! You make your weakness, 
then, the title of your security? In the necessities you have to 
watch and pray, you find, then, the privilege of dispensing with 
them ! And since, when is it that the sick are authorised to al- 
low themselves greater excesses, and make use of less precaution, 
than those who enjoy a perfect health? Privation has always been 
the way of the weak and infirm; and to allege your weakness 
as a right of dispensation from a more fervent and Christian 
life, is like enumerating your complaints, in order to persuade 
us that you have no occasion for medicine. Second reason, 
drawn from the passions, which are strengthened in a state of 
lukewarmness, and which proves that this state always ends in 
a departure from virtue and the loss of righteousness. 

To all these reasons I should add a third, drawn from the ex- 
ternal succours of religion necessary to the support of piety; 
and which become useless to the lukewarm and infidel soul. 

The Holy Sacrament not only becomes of no utility but even 
dangerous to him; either by the coldness with which he ap- 
proaches it, or by the vain confidence with which it inspires 
him; it is no longer a resource for him; it has lost its effect, like 
medicines too frequently made use of; it amuses his languor, 
but cannot cure him: It is like the food of the strong and healthy, 
which, so far from re-establishing, completes the ruin of the 
weak stomach : It is the breath of the Holy Spirit, which, un- 
able to re-illuminate the still smoking spark, entirely extinguishes 
it; that is to say, that the grace of the holy Sacrament, receiv- 
ed in a lukewarm and infidel heart, no longer operating there 
an increase of life and strength, never fails, sooner or later, to 
operate the death and condemnation attached to the abuse of 
these divine remedies. 

Prayer, that channel of grace; that nourishment to a faithful 

F 



82 



STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. V. 



heart; that sweetener of piety; that refuge against all attacks of 
the enemy; that cry of an afflicted soul, which renders the Lord 
so attentive to his necessities : Prayer, without which the 
Almighty no longer makes himself felt within us; without which 
we no longer know our father; we no longer render thanks to 
our benefactor, nor appease our judge; we expose no longer our 
wounds to our physician ; we live without God in the world. 
Prayer, in a word, so necessary to the most established virtue, 
to the lukewarm soul, is no longer but the wearisome occupa- 
tion of a distracted mind; of a heart dry, and shared betwixt a 
thousand foreign affections. He no longer experiences that 
love, those consolations, which are the fruit of a fervent and 
faithful life : He no longer, as if with a new light, sees the holy 
truths, which confirm the soul in its contempt for the world 
and love for the things of heaven; and which, after its departure 
hence, make it regard, with new disgust, every thing which 
foolish man admires: He leaves it, no longer filled with that 
lively faith which reckons as nothing all the obstacles and dis- 
gusts of virtue, and with a holy zeal devours all its sorrows: 
He no longer feels, after it, more love for his duty and horror 
at the world; more determination to fly from its dangers; more 
light to know its nothingness and misery, and strength to hate 
and struggle with himself; more terror for the judgments of 
God, and compunction for his own weaknesses: He leaves it 
only more fatigued than before with virtue; more filled with the 
phantoms of the world, which, in the moment when at the feet 
of the Almighty, have, it appears, agitated more briskly his im- 
agination, blasted and stained by all those images; more happy, 
by being quit of a burdensome duty; where he has experienced 
nothing so agreeable as the pleasure of finding it over; more 
eager, by amusements and infidelities, to supply this moment of 
weariness and pain; in a word, more distant from God, whom 
he has irritated by the infidelity and irreverence of his prayer. 
Such, my brethren, is the fruit which he reaps from it. In a 
word, all the external duties of religion, which support and rouse 
piety, are no longer to the lukewarm Christian but dead and 
inanimate customs where his heart is not; where there is more 
of habit than of love or spirit of piety; and where the only dis- 
position he brings is the weariness and languor of always doing 
the same thing. 

Thus, my brethren, the grace of this soul, being continually 
attacked and weakened, either by the practices of the world 
which it allows itself, or by those of piety, which it abuses; 
either by sensual objects, which nourish its corruption, or by those 
of religion, which increase its disgusts,* either by the pleasures 
which enervate it, or by the duties which fatigue it; all uniting 
to make it bend towards ruin, and nothing supporting it: Alas I 
what fate can it promise itself? Can the lamp without oil 
long continue to give light? The tree which no longer draws 
nourishment from the earth, can it fail to wither and be devo- 



Serm. V.] STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. 88 



ted to the fire? Now, such is the situation of the lukewarm 
Christian: Entirely delivered up to himself, nothing supports 
him ; surrounded by weariness and disgusts, nothing reanimates 
him; full of weakness and of languor, nothing protects him; 
every consolation of the just soul is to him an increase of lan- 
guor; every thing which gives support to a faithful Christian 
disgusts and overpowers him; whatever renders the yoke more 
easy to others, makes his more burdensome; and the succours 
of piety are no longer but his fatigues or his crimes. Now, in 
this state, O my God ! almost abandoned by thy grace, tired of 
thy yoke, disgusted with himself, as well as with virtue, weakened 
by diseases and their remedies, staggering at every step, a breath 
overturns him; he himself leans towards his fall, without any 
additional or foreign impression; and, to see him fall, there is no 
necessity for his being attacked. 

These are the reasons which prove the certainty of the loss 
of righteousness in a lukewarm and infidel life. But are so 
many proofs necessary, my dear hearer, when your own mis- 
fortunes have so sadly instructed you? Remember from whence 
you are fallen, as the Holy Spirit of God formerly said to a 
lukewarm and infidel soul: Remount to the source of the dis- 
orders under which you still bend: You will find it in the negli- 
gence and infidelity of which we speak. A birth of passion 
too feebly rejected, an occasion of danger too much frequented, 
practices of piety too frequently omitted or despised, convenience 
too sensually sought after, desires of pleasing too much listened 
to, dangerous writings too little avoided; the source is almost 
imperceptible: The torrent of iniquity proceeding from it has 
completely inundated the capacity of your soul; it was only a spark 
which has lighted up this great conflagration; it was a mojsel 
of leven, which, in the end, has fermented and corrupted the 
whole mass. You never believed it possible that you could be 
what at present you are : Whatever was said to you on this sub- 
ject, you heard as exaggerations of zeal and spirituality; you 
would then have come forward of your own accord, in order to 
clear yourself of certain steps, for you now feel not the smallest 
remorse: Remember from whence you are fallen; consider the 
depth of the abyss into which you are plunged; it is relaxation 
and slight infidelities which by degrees have conducted you to 
it. Once more, remember it, and see if that can be denomi- 
nated a sure or durable state which has brought you to the pre- 
cipice. 

Such is the usual artifice of Satan : He never at first proposes 
guilt; that would frighten away his prey, and remove it beyond 
the reach of his surprises: Too well he knows the road for en- 
tering the heart; he knows that he must gradually confirm the 
timid conscience against the horror of guilt, and propose nothing 
at first but honest purposes and certain limits in pleasure: It 
is not boldly, like the lion, he at first attacks; it is warily 



84 



STATE OF LUKEWARMNESS. [Serm. V. 



like the serpent: He does not lead you straight to the gulf ; 
he conducts you there by winding paths. No, my brethren, 
crimes are never the first essay of the heart. David was im- 
prudent and slothful before he became an adulterer; Solomon 
had allowed himself to be seduced and enervated by the delights 
and magnificence of royalty before he publicly appeared in the 
midst of lewd women ; Judas had given up his heart to money, 
before he put a price upon his Master; Peter was presump- 
tuous, before he renounced the truth. Vice has its progress 
as well as virtue: As the day, says the prophet, instructs the day, 
thus the night gives melancholy lessons to the night ; and there 
is not far betwixt a state which suspends all the grace of protec- 
tion, fortifies all the passions, renders useless all the succours 
of piety, and a state where it is entirely extinct. 

What, then, my dear hearer, can confirm or comfort you in 
this life of negligence and infidelity? Is it that exemption from 
guilt you have hitherto preserved? But I have shown you, that 
it is either guilt itself, or that it will not fail soon to lead you 
to it: Is it the love of ease? But in that you enjoy neither the 
pleasures of the world nor the consolations of virtue: Is it the 
assurance that the Almighty requires no more of you? But how 
can the lukewarm and unfaithful soul satisfy or please him, 
when from his mouth he rejects him? Is it the irregularity in 
which the generality of men live, and who carry it to an ex- 
cess which you avoid? But their fate is perhaps less to be mourn- 
ed, and less desperate than your own : They at least know their 
malady, while you regard your own as a state of perfect health. 
Is it the dread of being unable to support a more mortified, 
watchful and Christian life? But since you have hitherto been 
able to support some remains of virtue and innocence, without 
the comforts and consolations of grace, and in spite of the wear- 
inesses and disgusts which your lukewarmnesshas spread through 
all your duties, what will it be when the Spirit of God shall 
soften your yoke, and when a more fervent and faithful life shall 
have restored to you all the grace and consolations of which 
your hike war mness has deprived you? Piety is never sad or in- 
supportable but when it is cold and unfaithful. 

Rise, then, says a prophet, wicked and slothful soul; break 
the fatal charm which lulls and chains thee to thine indolence. 
The Lord whom thou believest to serve, because thou dost not 
openly affront him, is not the God of the wicked, but of the 
faithful; he is not the rewarder of idleness and sloth, but of 
tears, watchings, and combats: He establisheth not in his abode, 
and in his everlasting city 1 , the useless, but the vigilant and la- 
borious servant; and his kingdom, says the Apostle, is not of 
flesh and blood, that is to say, of an unworthy effeminacy and 
a life devoted to the appetites, but the strength and virtue of 
■God; namely, a continued vigilance; a generous sacrifice of all 
our inclinations; a constant contempt of all things which pass a- 



Serm. VI.] ON EVIL-SPEAKING. 



85 



way; and a tender and ardent desire for those invisible blessings 
which fade not nor ever pass away : Which may God in his in- 
finite raercy grant to all assembled here. Amen. 



SERMON VI. 
ON EVIL-SPEAKING, 
John ii, 24. 

But Jesus did not commit himself unto them ; because he knew all men. 

These were the same Pharisees, who a little before had been 
decrying to the people the actions of Jesus Christ, and, endea- 
vouring to poison the purity and sanctity of his words, now 
make a show of believing in him, and classing themselves among 
his disciples. And such is the character of the evil-speaker; 
under the mask of esteem, and the flattering expressions of 
friendship, to conceal the gall of bitterness and slander. 

Now, although this be, perhaps, the only vice which no cir- 
cumstance can palliate, it is the one we are most ingenious in 
concealing from ourselves, and to which piety and the world at 
present show the greatest indulgence. Not that the character 
of a slanderer is not equally odious to men, as, according to the 
expression of the Holy Spirit, it is abominable in the sight of 
God; but in that number they comprise only particular de- 
famers of a blacker and more avowed malignity, who deal their 
blows indiscriminately, and without art; and who, with suffi- 
cient malice to censure, are destitute of the wit necessary to 
please : Now, the defamers of that description are more rare ; 
and had we only them to address ourselves to, would be suffi- 
cient at present to point out, how much unworthy of reason and 
religion this vice is, to inspire with a just detestation of it those 
who feel themselves guilty. 

But there is another description of slanderers who condemn 
the vice, yet allow themselves the practice of it; who, without 
regard, defame their brethren, yet applaud themselves for cir- 
cumspection and moderation; who carry the sting to the heart, 
but, because it is more brilliant and piercing, perceive not 
the wound it has made. Now, defamers of this character are 
everywhere to be found: the world is filled with them; even 
the holy asylums are not free: this vice is the bond of union to 



86 



ON EVIL-SPEAKING. 



[Serm. VI. 



the assemblies of sinners; it often finds its way even into the 
society of the just; and we may safely say, that all have erred 
from the strait road; and there is not one who has preserved his 
tongue pure, and his lips undefiled. 

It is proper, then, my brethren, to expose at present the illu- 
sion of the pretexts made use of every day in the world, in jus- 
tification of this vice, and to attack it in the circumstances where 
you believe \t most innocent; for, were I to describe it to you, 
in general, with all its meanness, cruelty, and irreparability, 
you would no longer apply it to yourselves; and, far from in- 
spiring you with horror at it, I should be accessory towards your 
persuasion that you are free from its guilt. 

Now, what are the pretexts, which, in your eyes, soften or 
justify the vice of evil-speaking? In the first place, It is the 
lightness of the faults you censure; we persuade ourselves, that 
as it is not a matter of culpability, there cannot likewise be much 
harm in censuring it. 2dly, It is the public notoriety, by which 
those to whom we speak, being already informed of what is re- 
prehensible in our brother, no loss of reputation can be the con- 
sequence of our discourses. Lastly, Zeal for truth and the 
glory of God, which does not permit us to be silent on those 
disorders which dishonour him. Now, to these three pretexts, let 
us oppose three incontrovertible truths. To the pretext of the 
lightness of the faults; that the more the faults which you cen- 
sure are light, the more is the slander unjust: First truth. To 
the pretext of the public notoriety; that the more the faults of 
our brethren are known, the more cruel is the slander which 
censures them: Second truth. To the pretext of zeal; that the 
same charity, which, in piety, makes us hate sinners, makes us 
likewise cover the multitude of their faults. Last truth. 

Part I. The tongue, says the Apostle James, is a devouring 
fire, a world of iniquity, an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. 
And, behold, what I would have applied to the tongue of the 
evil-speaker, had I undertaken to give you a just and natural 
idea of all the enormity of this vice: I would have said, that the 
tongue of the slanderer is a devouring fire, which tarnishes what- 
ever it touches; which exercises its fury on the good grain e- 
qually as on the chaff; on the profane as on the sacred; which, 
wherever it passes, leaves only desolation and ruin; digs even 
into the bowels of the earth, and fixes itself on things the most 
hidden: turns into vile ashes, what, only a moment before, had 
appeared to us so precious and brilliant; acts with more vio- 
lence and danger than ever, in the time when it was apparently 
smothered up and almost extinct; which blackens what it cannot 
consume, and sometimes sparkles and delights before it destroys. 
I would have told you, that evil-speaking is an assemblage of ini- 
quity; a secret pride, which discovers to us the mote in our 
brother's eye, but hides the beam which is in our \>wn; a mean 



Serm. VI.] 



ON EVIL SPEAKING. 



87 



envy, which, hurt at the talents or prosperity of others, makes 
them the subject of its censures, and studies to dim the splendour 
of whatever outshines itself; a disguised hatred, which sheds, in 
its speeches, the hidden venom of the heart; an unworthy du- 
plicity, which praises to the face, and tears to pieces behind the 
back; a shameful levity, which has no command over itself or 
words, and often sacrifices both fortune and comfort to the im- 
prudence of an amusing conversation; a deliberate barbarity % 
which goes to pierce your absent brother; a scandal, where you 
become a subject of shame and sin to those who listen to you; 
an injustice, where you ravish from your brother what is dearest 
to him. I would have said, that slander is a restless evil, which 
disturbs society, spreads dissension through cities and countries, 
disunites the strictest friendships, is the source of hatred and 
revenge, fills, wherever it enters, with disturbances and confu- 
sion, and everywhere is an enemy to peace, comfort, and Chris- 
tian good-breeding. Lastly, I would have added, that it is an 
evil full of deadly poison; whatever flows from it is infected 
and poisons whatever it approaches; that even its praises are 
empoisoned, its applauses malicious, its silence criminal, its 
gestures, motions, and looks, have all their venom, and spread 
it each in their way. 

Behold, what in this discourse it would have been my duty, 
more at large, to have exposed to your view, had I not proposed 
only to paint to you the vileness of the vice, which I am now 
going to combat; but, as I have already said, these are only ge- 
neral invectives, which none apply to themselves. The more 
odious the vice is represented, the less do you perceive your- 
selves concerned in it; and though you acknowledge the princi- 
ple, you make no use of it in the regulation of your manners; 
because, in these general paintings, we always find features 
which resemble us not. I wish, therefore, to confine myself at 
present to the single object of making you feel all the injustice 
of that description of slander which you think the most inno- 
cent; and, lest you should not feel yourselves connected with 
what I shall say, I shall attack it only in the pretexts which 
you continually employ in its justification. 

Now, the first pretext which authorises in the world almost 
all the defamations, and is the cause that our conversations are 
now continual censures upon our brethren, is the pretended in- 
significancy of the vices we expose to view. We would not 
wish to tarnish a man of character or ruin his fortune, by dis- 
honouring him in the world; to stain the principles of a woman's 
conduct, by entering into the essential points of it; that would 
be too infamous and mean: But upon a thousand faults, which 
lead our judgment to believe them capable of all the rest; to in- 
spire the minds of those who listen to us with a thousand suspi- 
cions which point out what we dare not say; to make satirical 
remarks, which discover a mystery, where no person before had 



S8 



ON EVIL-SPEAKING. 



[Serm< VL 



perceived the least intention of concealment; by poisonous in- 
terpretations, to give an air of ridicule to manners which had 
hitherto escaped observation; to let every thing, on certain points, 
be clearly understood, while protesting that they are incapable 
themselves of cunning or deceit, is what the world makes little 
scruple of; and though the motives, the circumstances, and the 
effects of these discourses be highly criminal, yet gaiety and live- 
liness excuse their malignity, to those who listen to us, and even 
conceal from ourselves their atrocity. 

I say, in the first place, the motives. I know that it is, above 
all, by the innocency of the intention that they pretend to jus- 
tify themselves; that you continually say, that your design is 
not to tarnish the reputation of your brother, but innocently to 
divert yourselves with faults which do not dishonour him in the 
eyes of the world. You, my dear hearer, to divert yourself with 
his faults ! But what is that cruel pleasure, which carries sor- 
row and bitterness to the heart of your brother? Where is the 
innocency of an amusement, whose source springs from vices 
which ought to inspire you with compassion and grief? If 
Jesus Christ forbid us in the gospel to invigorate the languors 
of conversation by idle words, shall it be more permitted to you 
to enliven it by derisions and censures? If the law curse him, 
who uncovers the nakedness of his relations, shall you, who add 
raillery and insult to the discovery, be more protected from that 
malediction? If whoever call his brother fool, be worthy, ac- 
cording to Jesus Christ, of eternal fire, shall he who renders 
him the contempt and laughing-stock of a profane assembly, 
escape the same punishment ? You, to amuse yourself with his 
faults? But does charity delight in evil? Is that rejoicing in 
the Lord, as commanded by the apostle? If you love your 
brother as yourself, can you delight in what afflicts him? Ah! 
the church formerly held in horror the exhibitions of gladiators, 
and denied that believers, brought up in the tenderness and be- 
nignity of Jesus Christ, could innocently feast their eyes with 
the blood and death of these unfortunate slaves, or form a 
harmless recreation of so inhuman a pleasure. But you renew 
more detestable shows, to enliven your langour: You bring 
upon the stage, not infamous wretches devoted to death, but 
members of Jesus Christ, your brethren; and there you enter- 
tain the spectators with wounds which you inflict on persons 
rendered sacred by baptism. 

Is it then necessary that your brother should suffer, to amuse 
you? Can you find no delight in your conversations, unless his 
blood, as I may say, is furnished towards your iniquitous plea- 
sures? Edify each other, says St. Paul, by words of peace and 
charity; relate the wonders of God towards the just, the history 
of his mercies to sinners; recal the virtues of those who, with 
the sign of faith, have preceded us; make an agreeable relaxa- 
tion to yourselves, in reciting the pious examples of your 



Serm. VI.] ON EVIL-SPEAKING. 



89 



brethren with whom you live; with a religious joy, speak of 
the victories of faith, of the aggrandisement of the kingdom of 
Jesus Christ, of the establishment of truth, and the extinction 
of error, of the favours which Jesus Christ bestows on his 
church, by raising up in it faithful pastors, enlightened mem- 
bers, and religious princes; animate yourselves to virtue, by 
contemplating the little solidity of the world, the emptiness of 
pleasures, and the unhappmess of sinners, who yield themselves 
up to their unruly passions. Are these grand objects not wor- 
thy the delight of Christians? It was thus, however, that the 
first believers rejoiced in the Lord, and, from the sweets of their 
conversations, formed one of the most holy consolations to their 
temporal calamities. It is the heart, my brethren, which de- 
cides upon our pleasures: A corrupted heart feels no delight 
but in what recals to him the image of his vices: Innocent 
delights are only suitable to virtue. 

In effect, you excuse the malignity of your censures by the 
innocency of your intentions. But fathom the secret of your 
heart: Whence comes it that your sarcasms are always point- 
ed to such an individual, and that you never amuse yourself 
with more wit, or more agreeably, than in recalling his faults? 
May it not proceed from a secret jealousy? Do not his talents, 
fortune, credit, station, or character, hurt you more than his 
faults? Would you find him so fit a subject for censure, had 
he fewer of those qualities which exalt him above you? Would 
you experience such pleasure in exposing his foibles, did not the 
world find qualities in him both valuable and praiseworthy? 
Would Saul have so often repeated with such pleasure that 
David was only the son of Jesse, had he not considered him as 
a rival, more deserving than himself of the empire? Whence 
comes it, that the faults of all others find you more indulgent? 
That elsewhere you excuse every thing, but here every circum- 
stance comes empoisoned from your mouth? Go to the source, 
and examine if it is not some secret root of bitterness in your 
heart? And can you pretend to justify, by the innocency of 
the intention, discourses which flow from so corrupted a princi- 
ple? You maintain that it is neither from hatred nor jealousy 
Against your brother: I wish to believe it; but in your sar- 
casms, may there not be motives, perhaps, still more shameful 
and mean? Is it not your wish to render yourself agreeable, 
by turning your brother into an object of contempt and ridi- 
cule? Do you not sacrifice his character to your fortune? 
Courts are always so filled with these adulatory and sordidly 
interested satires on each other ! The great are to be pitied 
whenever they yield themselves up to unwarrantable aversions. 
Vices are soon found out, even in that virtue itself which dis- 
pleases them. 

But, after all, you do not feel yourselves guilty, you say, of 
all these vile motives; and that it is merely through indiscre- 



90 



ON EVIL-SPEAKING. 



[Serm. VI. 



tion, and levity of speech, if it sometimes happen that you de- 
fame your brethren. But is it by* that you can suppose your- 
self more innocent? Levity and indiscretion; that vice, so un- 
worthy of the gravity of a Christian, so distant from the seri- 
ousness and solidity of faith, and so often condemned in the 
gospel, can it justify another vice? What matters it to the 
brother whom you stab, whether it be done through indiscre- 
tion or malice? Does an arrow, unwittingly drawn, make a 
less dangerous or slighter wound than if sent on purpose? Is 
the deadly blow, which you give to your brother, more slight, 
because it was lanced through imprudence and levity? And 
what signifies the innocency of the intention, when the action 
is a crime? But, besides, Is there no criminality in indiscre- 
tion, with regard to the reputation of your brethren? In any 
case whatever, can more circumspection and prudence be re- 
quired? Are not all the duties of Christianity comprised in that 
of charity? Does not all religion, as I may say, consist in that? 
And to be incapable of attention and care, in a point so highly 
essential, is it not considering, as it were, all the rest as a sport ? 
Ah! it is here he ought to put a guard of circumspection on 
his tongue, weigh every word, put them together in his heart, 
says the sage Ecclesiasticus, and let them ripen in his mouth. 
Do any of these inconsiderate speeches ever escape you, against 
yourself? Do you ever fail in attention to what interests your 
honour or glory? What indefatigable cares! what exertions 
and industry, to make them prosper ! To what lengths we see 
you go, to increase your interest or improve your fortune ! If 
it ever happen that you take blame to yourself, it is always un- 
der circumstances which tend to your praise: You censure in 
yourself only faults which do you honour; and, in confessing 
your vices, you wish only to recapitulate your virtues: Self- 
love connects every thing with yourself. Love your brother as 
you love yourself, and every thing will recal you to him; you 
will be incapable of indiscretion, where his interest is concern- 
ed, and will no longer need our instructions, in respect to what 
you owe to his character and glory. 

But if these slanders, which you call trivial, be criminal in 
their motives, they are not less so in their circumstances. 

In the first place, I should make you observe, that the world, 
familiarised with guilt, and accustomed to see the most heinous 
vices now become the vices of the multitude, is no longer 
shocked at them; denominates light, defamations which turn 
upon the most criminal and shameful weaknesses: Suspicions 
of infidelity, in the sacred bond of marriage, are no longer a 
marked discredit or an essential stain; they are sources of de- 
rision and pleasantry: To accuse a courtier of insincerity and 
double-dealing, is no attack upon his honour; it is only cast- 
ing a ridicule on the protestations of sincerity with which he 
amuses us: To spread the suspicion of hypocrisy, in the sin- 



Serm. VI.] ON EVIL-SPEAKING. 



91 



cerest piety, is not an insult to God through his saints; it is a 
language of derision, which custom has rendered common: In 
a word, excepting those crimes punishable by the public autho- 
rity, and which are attended with the loss of credit and pro- 
perty, all others seem trivial, and become the ordinary subject 
of conversation and of the public censure. 

But let us not pursue this reflection farther. I wish to allow 
that your brother's faults are light: The more they are light, the 
more are you unjust in heightening them: The more he merits 
indulgence on your part, the more are we to presume in you a ma- 
lignity of observation, from which nothing can escape; a natural 
hardness of heart, which can excuse nothing. Were the faults 
of your brother important, you would spare him, you say; you 
would find him entitled to your indulgence; politeness and re- 
ligion would make your silence a duty : What ! because his 
weaknesses are only trivial, you find him less worthy of your 
regard? The very circumstance which ought to make him 
respectable, authorises you in making him the butt of your sar- 
casms? Are you not, says the apostle, become a judge of ini- 
quitous thoughts? And your eye, is it then wicked, only be- 
cause your brother is good? Besides, the faults which you 
censure are light ; but would they appear so to you, were you 
to be reproached with them? When certain discourses, held 
in your absence, have reached your ears, and which, in fact, 
attacked essentially neither your honour nor probity, but only 
acquainted the public with some of your weaknesses, what have 
been your sensations? My God! Then it was that you mag- 
nified every thing; that every circumstance appeared important 
to you; that, not satisfied with exaggerating the malice of the 
words, you raked up the secret of the intention, and hoped to 
find motives still more odious than the discourses. In vain you 
are told, that these are not reproaches which essentially in- 
terest you, and at the worst cannot disgrace you : You think 
yourselves insulted; you mention them with bitter complaints; 
you blaze out, and are no longer masters of your resentment; 
and whilst all the world blames the excess of your sensibility, 
you alone obstinately persist in the belief of its being a serious 
affair, and that your honour is interested in it. Make use, 
then, of this rule in the faults which you publish of your bro- 
ther: Apply the offence to yourselves: every thing is light 
which is against him; but with regard to what touches you, the 
smallest circumstance appears important to your pride and 
worthy of all your resentment. 

Lastly, The vices which you censure are light; but do you 
add nothing of your own to them? Do you faithfully exhibit 
them as they are? In their relation, do you never mingle the 
malignity of your Own conjectures? Do you not place them in 
a point of view different from their natural state? Do you 
not embellish your tale? And, in order to make the hero of 



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[Serm. VI. 



your ridicule agreeable, do you not fashion him to the wish of 
the company, and not such as in reality he is? Do you never 
accompany your speeches with certain gestures, which allow all 
to be understood; with certain expressions which open the 
minds of your hearers to a thousand suspicions equally rash as 
dishonourable? Even with a certain silence, which permits 
more to be imagined than any thing you could have possibly 
said? For, how difficult is it to confine ourselves to the bounds 
of truth, when we are no longer within those of charity ! The 
more what, we censure is light, the more is calumny to be 
dreaded; we must embellish, to attract attention; and we be- 
come calumniators, where we did not suppose ourselves even 
censurers. 

Behold the circumstances which regard you; but if, on their 
account, the slanders which you think light, be highly crimi- 
nal, will they be less so with respect to the individuals whom 
they attack? 

In the jtrst place, it is a person, perhaps of a sex, to whom, 
especially on certain points, the slightest stains are important; 
to whom it is a dishonour to be publicly spoken of; to whom 
raillery becomes an insult, and every suspicion an accusation; 
in a word, a person, whom not to praise, becomes an outrage 
and a disgrace to their station: Thus St Paul would have 
every woman to be adorned with bashfulness and modesty; 
that is to say, he would wish those virtues to be as conspicu- 
ous in them as the ornaments with which they are covered; 
and the highest eulogy which the Holy Spirit makes on Ju- 
dith, after speaking of her beauty, youth, and great wealth, is, 
that in all Israel not a person was to be found who had as- 
persed her conduct, and that her reputation corresponded with 
her virtue. 

2dly. Your censures are perhaps pointed towards your supe- 
riors; or against those whom providence has established above 
you, and to whom the law of God commands you to render 
that respect and submission to which they are entitled. For 
the pride which hates inferiority always recompenses itself by 
finding out weaknesses, and foibles in those to whom it is under 
the necessity of yielding obedience; the more they are exalted, 
the more they are exposed to our censures : Malignity is even 
more quick-sighted in regard to their errors: nothing in their 
actions is pardoned; the very persons most loaded with their 
kindnesses, or most honoured by their familiarity, are frequent- 
ly those who most openly publish their imperfections and vices; 
-and besides violating the sacred duty of respect, they likewise 
render themselves guilty of the mean and shameful crime of in- 
gratitude. 

3dly. It is a person, perhaps consecrated to God, and estab- 
lished in the church, whom you censure; who, engaged by the 
sanctity of his vocation, to more exemplary, pure, ani irre- 



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93 

% 



proaehable manners, finds himself stained and dishonoured li- 
censures which would not affect the reputation of persons of 
the world. Thus the Lord, in the Scriptures, eurseth those 
who shall even meddle with his anointed. Nevertheless, the 
traits of slander are never more animated, more brilliant, or 
more applauded in the world, than when directed against the mi- 
nisters of his holy altar: the world, so indulgent to itself, seems 
to have preserved its severity only on their account; and for tliem 
it has eyes more censorious, and a tongue more empoisoned, than 
for the rest of men. It is true, O my God! that our conversa- 
tion amongst the people is not always holy and free from re- 
proach: that we frequently adopt the manners, luxury, indo- 
lence, idleness, and pleasures of the world, against which we 
ought to struggle; that we hold out to believers more examples 
of pride and negligence than of virtue: that we are more jealous 
of pre-eminence than of the duties of our calling: and that it is 
difficult for the world to honour a character which we ourselves 
disgrace. But as I have often said, my brethren, our infidelities 
ought rather to be the subject of your tears than of your plea- 
santry and censures : God generally punishes the disorders of 
the people by the corruption of the priests; and the most 
dreadful scourge with which he strikes kingdoms and empires, 
is that of not raising up in them venerable pastors, and zealous 
ministers, who may stem the torrent of dissipation ; it is that of 
permitting faith and religion to become weakened, even amongst 
those who are its defenders and depositaries that the light, 
which was meant to instruct you, should be changed into dark- 
ness; that the co-operators in your salvation should assist, by 
their example, towards your destruction: that even from the 
sanctuary, from whence ought to proceed only the good savour 
of Jesus Christ, there should issue a smell of death and scandal: 
and, in a word, that abominations should find their way even 
into the holy place. But what alteration does the relaxation of 
our manners make in the sanctity of the vocation which conse- 
crates us? Are the sacred vases which serve on the altar, though 
composed of a mean metal, less worthy of your respect? And, 
even granting the minister may merit your contempt, would you 
be less sacrilegious in not respecting nis ministry? 

What shall I say? Your detractions and censures are perhaps 
directed against persons who make a public profession of piety, 
and whose virtue your hearers formerly respected. You then 
persuade them that they had been too credulous; you authorise 
them to believe that few worthy and intrinsically good charac- 
ters are to be found on the earth: that all those held out as 
such, when narrowly examined, are like the rest of men: You 
confirm the prejudices of the world against virtue, and give fresh 
. credit to those discourses, so usual, and so injurious to religion, 
with regard to the piety of the servants of Jesus Christ. Now 
do all these appear so very light to you? Ah. my brethren! the 



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[8erm.VL 



just on this earth are like the holy ark, in the midst of which 
the Lord dwells, and any contempt or insult to which he most 
rigorously avenges: They may stagger in their road, like the 
ark of Israel, while conducting in triumph to Jerusalem,, for the 
purest and most shining virtue has its spots and eclipses, and 
even the most solid cannot always equally support itself; but 
the Lord is incensed, when rash and impure hands, like those of 
Uzzah, shall venture to put them right: and scarcely have they 
touched them when they are smote by his wrath : He takes to 
himself the slightest insults with which they dishonour liis ser- 
vants, and he cannot endure that virtue, which has found ad- 
mirers even amongst tyrants and the most barbarous nations, 
should frequently, among believers, find only censures and de- 
risions. Thus the little children of Israel were devoured on the 
spot, for having mocked the small number of hairs of the man 
of God: nevertheless, these were only the puerile indiscretions 
so pardonable at their age. Fire from heaven fell upon the of- 
ficer of the impious Ahaziah, and in a moment consumed him 
for having in derision called Elijah the man of God: neverthe- 
less it was a courtier, from whom little regard might be ex- 
pected for the austerity and simplicity of a prophet or for the 
virtue of a man, rustic in his appearance, and hateful to his 
master. Michal was struck with barrenness for having too harsh- 
ly censured the holy excesses of joy and piety of David before the 
altar: nevertheless it proceeded merely from female delicacy. 
But to meddle with those who serve the Lord, is, according to 
the Scripture, to meddle with the apple of your eye: He in- 
visibly ciu'ses those rash censures on piety : and though he may 
not strike them, as formerly, with instant death, yet he marks 
on their forehead, from this life forward, the stamp of reproba- 
tion, and denies to themselves that precious gift of sanctity and 
grace which they had despised in others : nevertheless, it is the 
upright who are now become the general butt of the malignity 
of public discourses: and we may safely say. that virtue gives 
birth to more censurers in the world than vice. 

I do not add, that if these slanders, which you term light, be 
hi^hlv criminal in then motives and cnciunstances, they are 
still more so in then consequences : I say their consequences, 
my brethren, which are always irreparable. You may expiate 
the crime of voluptuousness by mortification and penitence: the 
crime of hatred by love for your enemy: the crime of ambition 
by a renunciation of the honours and grandeurs of the age ; the 
crime of injustice by a restoration of what you had unjustly ra- 
vished from your brother; even the crime of impiety and free- 
thinking, by a religious and public respect for the worship of your 
fathers; hut what remedy, what virtue, can repair the crime of 
detraction? You revealed to only one person the vices of your 
brother: It may be so; but that unlucky confidant will soon, in 
his turn, have communicated it to others, who, on their part, 



Serm. VI.] ON EVIL-SPEAKING. 



95 



no longer regarding as a secret what they have just heard, will 
relate it to the first comers: in the relation of it, every one 
will add new circumstances: each, in his way. will empoison it 
with some new trait; in proportion as they publish, they will 
increase, they will magnify it : Similar to a spark of fire, says 
St. James, which, wafted by an impetuous wind to different 
places, sets in flames the forests and countries it reaches : Such 
is the destiny of detraction. 

What you had mentioned in secret was nothing at first, and 
seemed stifled and buried under its own ashes; but this fire lies 
hid for a while only in order to burst forth with redoubled fury; 
that nothing soon acquires reality, by passing through a diversi- 
ty of mouths; every one will add to it whatever his passion, 
interest, disposition of mind, or his own malignity, may hold 
out to him as probable: The source is hardly perceptible; but, 
assisted in its course by a thousand foreign streams, the united 
torrent will overwhelm the court, city, and country: and that, 
which at its birth was only a private and imprudent pleasantry, 
but a simple idea, but a malicious conjecture, will become a se- 
rious affair, a public and formal dishonour, the subject of every 
conversation, and an eternal stain upon the character of your 
brother. Repair now, if you can, the injustice and scandal; 
restore to your brother the good name of which you have de- 
prived him. Will you pretend to oppose the public inveteracy, 
and singly hold forth his praise? But they will regard you as a 
new comer who is ignorant of what has taken place in the 
world; and your praises, come far too late, will serve only to 
draw upon him fresh satires. Now, what a multitude of crimes 
proceeding from only one ! The sins of a whole people become 
yours; you defame through the mouths of all your fellow-citi- 
zens; you are likewise answerable for the guilt of all who listen 
to you. What penitence can expiate evils to which it can no 
longer afford relief? And will your tears be able to blot out 
what shall never be effaced from the memory of man? x\gain, 
were the scandal to end with you, your death, by terminating it, 
might be its expiation before God. But it is a scandal which will 
survive you; the shameful histories of courts never die with 
their heroes. Lascivious writers have transmitted to us the 
anecdotes and irregularities of the courts which have preceded 
us ; and licentious authors will be found amongst us, to acquaint 
the ages to come with the public rumours, the scandalous cir- 
cumstances, and the vices of our own. 

O my God! these are of that description of sins of which we 
know not either the enormity or extent ; but we know, that to 
become a stumbling-block to our brethren is to overturn for 
them the work of thy Son's mission, and to destroy the fruit of 
his labours, of his death, and of all his ministry. — Such is the 
illusion of the pretext which you draw from the lightness of 
your slanders; the motives are never innocent, the circum- 



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[Serm. VI 



stances always criminal, the consequences irreparable. Let us 
examine if the pretext of the public notoriety be better founded, 
This is what yet remains for me to investigate. 

Part II. Whence comes it that the majority of precepts are 
violated by those very persons who profess themselves their ob- 
servers, and that we find more difficulty in bringing the world to 
acknowledge than to correct its transgressions? The reason is, 
that our ideas of duty are never taken from the ground-work of 
religion ; that we never enter into the spirit to decide upon the 
letter; and that few people ascend to the principle to clear up 
the doubts which corruption forms on the detail of the conse- 
quences. 

Now, to apply this maxim to my subject: What are the rules 
in the gospel which constitute slander a crime to the disciples of 
Jesus Christ? In the first place it is the precept of Christian 
humility, which, as it ought to establish in us a profound con- 
tempt of ourselves, and to open our eyes on the endless multi- 
tude of our own wants, should at the same time shut our eyes 
on those of our brethren. In the second place, it is the duty of 
charity, that charity so recommended in the gospel; the grand 
precept of the law, which covers the faults it cannot correct, ex- 
cuses those it cannot cover, delights not in evil, and with diffi- 
culty believes, because it never wishes it to happen. Lastly, it 
is the inviolable rule of justice, which, never permitting us to 
do to others what we would not have done to ourselves, con- 
demns whatever goes beyond these equitable bounds. Now, the 
scandalous discourses which turn upon those faults which you 
term public, essentially wound these three rules: Judge, then, 
of their innocency. 

1st. They wound the precept of Christian humility. Indeed, 
my dear hearer, were you feelingly touched with your own 
wants, says a holy father; were your own sin incessantly before 
your eyes, like the penitent David, you would find neither suf- 
ficient leisure nor attention to remark the faults of your breth- 
ren. The more they were public, the more would you in se- 
cret thank the Lord for averting from you that scandal; the 
more would you feel your gratitude awakened, when you con- 
sidered, that, though fallen perhaps into the same errors, he hath 
not permitted them to be proclaimed from the house-tops, like 
those of your brother; that he hath left in obscurity your deeds 
of darkness; that he hath covered them, as I may say, with his 
wings; and that, in the eyes of men, he hath preserved for you 
an honour and an innocence which you have so often forfeited 
before Mm: You would tremble, while saying to yourself, that 
perhaps he hath spared your confusion in this world, only to 
render it more bitter and more durable in the next. 

Such is the disposition of Christian humility towards the 
public disgraces of our brethren: We should often speak of 



Serm. VI.] ON EVIL-SPEAKING. 



97 



them to ourselves, but almost never to others. Thus, when the 
Scribes and Pharisees presented to our Saviour the woman 
caught in adultery, and eagerly pressed him to give his judg- 
ment; though the guilt of the sinner was public, Jesus Christ 
kept a profound silence; and to their insidious and pressing in- 
treaties to explain himself, he simply answered, "He that is 
without sin amongst you, let him first cast a stone at her;" as 
if he thereby meant to make them understand, that sinners like 
them were little entitled to condemn, with so high a hand, the 
crime of that woman; and that, to acquire the right of casting 
a single stone at her, it was necessary the individual should 
himself be free from reproach. And behold, my brethren, what 
I wish to say to you at present: The evil conduct of such a 
person is become notorious: Very well; whoever of you is 
without sin, let him cast the first stone ! If, before God, you 
have nothing, perhaps more criminal, with which to reproach 
yourself, speak with freedom; condemn, in the severest man- 
ner, his fault, and open upon him the whole flood of your de- 
risions and censures : it is permitted to you. Ah ! you, who 
so hardily speak of it, you are more fortunate; but are you 
more innocent than he? You are thought to possess more vir- 
tue, and more regard for your duty; but God who knoweth 
you, will he judge like men? Were the darkness which conceals 
your shame to be dissipated, would not every stone you throw 
recoil upon yourselves? Were an unexpected circumstance to 
betray your secret, would not the audacity and malicious joy 
with which you censure, add additional ridicule to your confu- 
sion and disgrace? Ah! it is only to artifices and arrange- 
ments, which the justice of God may disconcert and lay opea 
in an instant, that you are indebted for this phantom of repu- 
tation on which you pride yourselves so much: You perhaps 
border on the moment which shall reveal your shame; and, far 
from blushing in secret ^nd in silence, when faults like your 
own are made known, you speak of and relate them with plea- 
sure, and you furnish the public with traits which one day it 
will employ against yourself: It is the threat and prediction of 
our Saviour. All they that take the sword shall perish with 
the sword: You pierce your brother with the sword of the 
tongue; with the same weapon shall you be pierced in your 
turn; and though you were even exempted from the vices you 
so boldly censure in others, the just God will deliver you up 
to it. 

Disgrace is the eommon punishment of pride. Peter, on the 
evening of the Lord's supper, never ceased to exaggerate the 
guilt of the disciple by whom his Master was to be betrayed: He 
was the most anxious of them all to, know his name, and the 
most forward to express his detestation of his perfidy; and, im- 
mediately after, he falls himself into the infidelity which he 
had so lately blamed with such pride and confidence 

G 



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[Serm. VL 



draws down upon us the wrath and curse of God so much as 
the malicious pleasure with which we magnify the faults of our 
brethren; and his mercy is incensed, that these afflicting exam- 
ples, which he permits, for the sole purpose of recalling us to 
our own weaknesses and awakening our vigilance, should flat- 
ter our pride, and excite only our derisions and censures. 

You depart, then, from the rules of Christian humility, when 
you permit yourselves to censure the faults, however public, of 
your brother; but you likewise essentially wound those of 
charity: For charity never faileth, says the Apostle. Now, if 
the vices of your brother be known to those who listen to you, 
to what purpose, then, do you repeat them afresh? What indeed 
can be your intention? To blame his conduct? But, is his shame 
not already sufficient? Would you wish to overwhelm an un- 
fortunate wretch, and give the last stab to a man already pierced 
with a thousand mortal blows? His guilt has already been exag- 
gerated by so many dark and malicious hearts, who have spread 
it in colours sufficient to blacken it for ever: Is he not sufficiently 
punished? He is now worthy of your pity rather than of your 
censures. What then could be your intentions? To condole 
with him for his misfortune? But to open afresh his wounds, is 
a strange way of condoling with an unfortunate brother. Is true 
compassion thus cruel? What is it then? To justify your pro- 
phecies and former suspicions on his conduct? To tell us, that 
you had always believed that sooner or later it would come to 
that? But you come then to triumph over Ms misfortune? To 
applaud yourself for his disgrace? To claim an honour to yourself 
for the malignity of your judgment? Alas! what glory can it be 
to a Christian to have suspected his brother; to have believed 
him guilty before he was known as such ; to have rashly foreseen 
his disgraces yet to come; we, who ought not to see them, even 
when they have taken place? Ah! you can prophecy so justly 
on the destiny of others: Be a prophet in your own country, 
and anticipate the misfortunes which threaten you: Why do 
you not prophecy thus for yourself, that unless you fly from 
such an opportunity, and such a danger, you will perish in it? 
That, unless you dissolve such a connexion, the public, which 
already murmurs, will at last break out, and then you will find 
it too late to repair the scandal? That unless you quit these 
excesses, into which the passions of youth and a bad education 
have thrown you, your affairs and fortune will be ruined beyond 
resource? It is on these points that you ought to exercise your 
art of conjecture. What madness, while surrounded one's-self 
with precipices, to be occupied in contemplating from afar those 
that threaten our brethren? 

Besides, the more your brother's disgraces are public, the 
more affected ought you to be with the scandal which they 
necessarily occasion to the Church; with the advantage which 
the wicked and the free-thinkers will draw from them, to blas- 
pheme the name of the Lord, to harden themselves in impiety. 



Serm. VI. j 



ON EVIL-SPEAKING. 



99 



and to persuade themselves that these are weaknesses common 
to all men, and that they are most virtuous who best know how 
to conceal them: The more ought you to be afflicted at the oc- 
casion which these public examples of irregularity give to weak 
souls to fall into the same disorders; the more does charity ob- 
lige you to grieve over them; the more ought you to wish, that 
the remembrance of these faults should perish; that the day and 
the places of their revealment should be effaced from the memory 
of men; and, lastly, the more ought you, by your silence, to 
endeavour to suppress them. But the whole world speaks of 
them, you say: your silence will not prevent the public con- 
versations; consequently, you make remarks in your turn. 
The inference is barbarous: Because you are unable to repair 
the disgrace, are you permitted to augment it? Because you 
cannot save your brother from shame, shall you assist to over- 
whelm him with confusion and infamy? Because almost every 
one casts a stone at him, shall it be less cruel in you to throw 
one in your turn, and to unite with those who bmise and beat 
him in pieces? Setting religion aside, how beautiful it is to de- 
clare for the unfortunate ! How much real dignity and great- 
ness of soul in sheltering under our protection those abandon- 
ed by the world! And, even admitting the rules of charity 
were not to make it a duty to us, the feelings alone of glory 
and humanity should in this case be sufficient. 

3dly, You not only violate the holy rules of charity, but 
you are also a breaker of those of justice. For the faults of 
your brother are public; let it be so; but place yourself in the 
same situation, would you exact from him less deference, or less 
humanity, were your disgrace to be no longer a mystery? Would 
you agree, that the public example gave to your brother a right 
against you, which you arrogate to yourself against him? Would 
you accept on his part, in justification of his malignity, an ex- 
cuse which would render him still more odious, mean, and 
cruel? Besides, how do you know whether the author of all 
these reports be not an imposter? So many false reports are 
circulated in the world; and the malice of men renders them so 
credulous on the faults of others ! How do you know but these 
calamities have been circulated by an enemy, a rival, or some 
envious person in order to ruin him, who has thwarted his pas- 
sions or his fortune? Are such instances rare? Whether it 
be not some heedless person who has given occasion to all these 
discourses, by an indiscreet expression, uttered without thought, 
and laid hold of through malice ? Are such mistakes impossi- 
ble? Whether it be not a mere conjecture, originally circulated 
as such, and afterwards given as a truth? Are such alterations 
uncommon in public rumours? What could have a greater ap- 
pearance of feasibility, to the children of the captivity, than the 
alleged misconduct of Susanna. The judges of the people of 
God, venerable through their age and dignity, deposed against 



100 



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[Serm. VI. 



her; the people exclaimed against her as an adulteress; they 
looked upon her as the disgrace of Israel; nevertheless, it was 
her modesty alone which drew upon her these insults; and had 
not a Daniel heen found in her time, who had the courage to 
doubt a general report, the blood of that innocent woman must 
have stained the whole people. And, without departing from 
oar gospel, were not the sacrilegious reports, which held out 
Jesus as an impostor and Samaritan, become the public dis- 
courses of all Judea? The Priests and Pharisees, people to whom 
the dignity of their station, and the regularity of their manners, 
attracted the respect and confidence of the people, strengthened 
them by their authority: Nevertheless, would you excuse such 
amongst the Jews as, on reports so common, spoke of the Saviour 
of the world as a seducer, who imposed on the credulity of the 
people? You expose yourself, then, to the guilt of having ca- 
lumniated your brother; however circulated the rumours against 
him may be, his crime, of which you have not been a witness, 
is always dubious to you; and you do him an injustice, when 
you propagate as true, what you have only heard from public 
reports, often false, and always rash. 

But I go further: When your brother's disgrace should even 
be certain, and the malignity of reports should have added no- 
thing to its criminality; how can you know that the very shame 
of seeing it so public may not have recalled him to himself; and 
that a sincere repentance, and tears of compunction, may not have 
already effaced and expiated it before God? Years are not always 
required for grace to triumph over a rebellious heart: there 
are victories which it leaves not to time; and a public disgrace 
often turns out the moment of mercy, which decides upon the 
conversion of the sinner. Now, if your brother is in a state of 
repentance, are you not unjust and cruel to revive faults which 
his penitence has effaced, and which the Lord hath ceased to 
remember? Do you recollect the sinful woman in the gospel? 
Her irregularities were notorious, seeing she had been known 
through the whole city as a prostitute; nevertheless, when the 
Pharisee reproached her with her sins, her tears and love had 
effaced them at the feet of out* Saviour; the goodness of God 
had remitted her errors, yet the malignity of men was unable 
to obliterate them. 

Lastly. Your brother's disgrace was public; that is to say, it 
was confusedly known that his conduct was not free from re- 
proach; and you come to particularise the circumstances, to 
proclaim his deeds, to explain the motives, and to lay open the 
whole mystery; to confirm what they but imperfectly knew; 
to tell them of what they knew not at all; and to applaud your- 
self, for appearing better instructed in your brother's misfor- 
tune than those who listen to you: Some degree of character, 
though wavering, yet remained to him; he still preserved, at 
least, some remains of honour, a spark of life, and you complete- 



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ON EVIL-SPEAKING. 101 



ly extinguish it I do not add, that these public reports, per- 
haps originated from people of no character, persons of neither 
reputation nor consequence to convince: Hitherto none durst 
yield credit to rumours so poorly supported; but you, who, by 
your rank, birth, and dignities, have acquired an influence over 
the minds, remove every shadow of doubt or uncertainty: 
Your name alone will now serve as a proof against the inno- 
cency of your brother; and in future it will be cited in justifi- 
cation of the general reports. Now, can any thing be harder 
or more unjust, both on account of the injury you do to him, 
and of the service you fail to perform? Your silence on his 
fault might alone perhaps have stopped the public defamation, 
and you would have been cited to clear his innocence, as you 
now are to blacken it: And what more respectable use could 
you have made of your rank and influence? The more you are 
exalted in the world, the more ought you to be religious and 
circumspect on the reputation of your brethren; the more ought 
a noble decency to render you reserved on their errors: The 
discourses of the vulgar are soon forgot; they expire in coming 
into the world; but the words of the great never fall in vain; 
and the public is always a faithful echo, either to the praises 
they bestow or to the censures they allow themselves to utter. 
My God! thou teachest us, by concealing thyself the sins of 
men, to conceal them on our part; to reveal our faults, thou 
waitest with a merciful patience the day when the secrets of 
our hearts shall be manifested: And we by a rash malignity, 
anticipate the time of thy vengeance; we, who are so interested, 
that the secrecies of our hearts, and the mystery of the con- 
sciences, should not as yet be laid open to thee. 

Thus, , you particularly, my brethren, whom rank and birth 
exalt above others, be not satisfied with putting a check upon 
your tongue; according to the advice of the Holy Spirit, pre- 
sent a melancholy and severe countenance, a silence of disap- 
probation and indignation to every defamatory discourse; for 
the crime is exactly equal between the malignity of the speaker 
and the satisfaction of those who listen to him. Let us sur- 
round our ears with thorns, that they may not be accessible to 
poisonous insinuations ; that is to say, let us not only shut them 
against these words of blood and gall, but let us return them on 
their author, in a manner equally bitter and mortifying. Were 
slander to find fewer approvers, the kingdom of Jesus Christ 
would soon be purged of that scandal: Slander is pleasing; and 
a vice which pleases soon becomes a desirable talent: We 
animate slander by our applauses; and as there is no person but 
wishes to be applauded, there are few, likewise, who do not 
study it, and endeavour to make a merit of slandering with 
skill. 

But what is surprising is, that piety itself frequently serves 
as a pretext to that vice, which saps the very foundations of 



102 



ON EVIL-SPEAKING. 



[Serm. VI. 



piety, and which sincere piety detests. This ought to be the 
last part of this discourse; but I shall say only a single word 
upon it. Yes, my brethren, slander frequently finds, in piety 
itself, wherewithal to colour itself : It decks itself out in the 
appearance of zeal: Hatred to vice seems to authorise the cen- 
sure of sinners; those who make a profession of virtue often 
believe that they are honouring God, and rendering glory to 
him, when they dishonour and exclaim against those who offend 
him; as though the privilege of piety, whose soul is charity, 
were to dispense us even from charity. It is not that I wish 
here to justify the discourses of the world, and to furnish it 
with new traits against the zeal of the upright; but, at the same 
time, I ought not to dissemble, that the liberty which they as- 
sume, of censuring the conduct of their brethren, is one of the 
most common abuses of piety. 

Now, my dear hearer, you whom this discourse regards, lis- 
ten to, and never forget, the rules which the gospel prescribes 
to true zeal. 

1st. Remember, that the zeal which makes us lament over 
the scandals that dishonour the church, is contented with la- 
menting them before God; -with praying him not to forget his 
former mercies; to cast his propitious regards upon the people; 
to establish his reign in all hearts; and to recal sinners from their 
erroneous ways. Behold the holy manner of lamenting over 
the disgraces of your brethren; mention them frequently to the 
Lord, but forget them in the presence of men. 

2dly. Remember, that piety gives you no right of empire or 
authority over your brethren: That if you be not established 
over them, and responsible for their conduct, whether they fall 
or remain stedfast, is the concern of the Lord and not yours; 
consequently, that your continual and public lamentations over 
their irregularities proceed from a principle of pride, malignity, 
levity, and intolerancy; that the church has its pastors to su- 
perintend the flock; that the ark has its ministers to sustain it, 
without needing the interference of any foreign or imprudent 
succours; and, lastly, that by these means, far from correcting 
your brethren, you dishonour piety; you justify the discourses 
of the wicked against the just; and you authorise them in say- 
ing, as formerly in the Book of Wisdom, Why professeth the 
righteous to have a right to fill the streets, and the public 
places, with their clamours and upbraidings against our con- 
duct, and holdeth it out as a point of virtue to defame us in the 
minds of our brethren? 

3dly. Remember, that the zeal regulated by wisdom seeks 
the salvation, and not the defamation of the brother it wishes to 
edify; that it loves not to injure; that, in order to render itself 
useful, it studies to render itself amiable; that it is more affect- 
ed with the misfortune and loss of its brother than irritated 
against or scandalised by his errors; that, far from going to 



Serm. VI.] ON EVIL-SPEAKING. 



103 



publish them to others, it would wish to be enabled to conceal 
them from itself; and that the zeal which censures them, far 
from lessening the evil, serves only to augment the scandal. 

4thly. Remember, that the censorious zeal which you dis- 
play is useless to your brother, seeing he witnesses it not; that, 
far from being of service, it is even hurtful to his conversion, to 
which you raise up obstacles, by irritating him against your 
censures, should he happen to be informed of them; that it is 
injurious to his reputation, which you wound; and, lastly, to 
those that listen to you, who, respecting your pretended virtue, 
never entertain a doubt that they can err, while following your 
steps; and no longer place slander among the number of vices. 
Zeal is humble, and has eyes for nothing but its own wants; it 
is simple, and much more disposed to be credulous with regard 
to good than evil; it is merciful, and is always indulgent to the 
faults of others, in the same proportion as it is severe to its own 
weaknesses; it is gentle and timorous, and prefers to have fail- 
ed in sufficiently blaming vice, to rashly exposing itself to go too 
far in censuring the sinner. 

Thus, my brethren, you who, returned from the errors of the 
world, now serve the Lord, allow me to conclude, with address- 
ing to you the same words, formerly spoken by a holy father to the 
servants of Jesus Christ, who, through an indiscreet zeal, made 
no scruple of tearing in pieces the characters of their brethren. 

u A tongue which has confessed Jesus Christ, which has re- 
nounced the errors and splendours of the world, which every 
day blesses the God of peace at the foot of the altar, and is of- 
ten consecrated, by participation of the holy mysteries, should 
no longer be intolerant, dangerous, and full of gall and bitter- 
ness against its brethren. It is disgracing religion, after hav- 
ing offered up pure prayers and thanksgivings to the Lord in 
the assembly of believers, to go and spit out the venomous traits 
of the serpent, against those Avhom the unity of faith, charity, 
the sacrament, and even their very errors, should render more 
endeared and more respectable to you." 

By the wisdom and moderation of our discourses, let us de- 
prive the enemies of virtue of every occasion to blaspheme 
against it; let us correct our brethren by the sanctity of our 
example rather than by the keenness of our censures; let us 
recal them, by living better than they, and not by speaking 
against them; let us render virtue respectable by its sweetness 
rather than by its severity; let us draw sinners towards us by 
compassionating rather than censuring their faults; in order 
that our Adrtue may be conspicuous to them, only through our 
charity and indulgence, and that our tender care to cover and 
excuse their faults may induce them to accuse and condemn 
themselves with more severity, when they perceive the differ- 
ence of our conduct: By these means we shall regain our 
brethren; we shall honour piety; we shall overthrow impiety 



104 ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. [Serm. VII. 



and freethinking; we shall deprive the world of all occasion for 
those discourses, so common and so injurious to real virtue: 
And, after having used mercy towards our brethren, we shall 
with more confidence go to present ourselves before the Father 
of mercies, and the God of all consolation, to ask mercy for 
ourselves. 



SERMON VII. 
ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. 
John vii, 33. 

Yet a little while am I with you, and then I go unto him that sent me. 

An improper use of time is the source of all the disorders which 
reign amongst men. Some pass their whole life in idleness and 
sloth, equally useless to the world, their country, and them- 
selves; others, in the tumult of business and worldly affairs. 
Some appear to exist only for the purpose of indulging an un- 
worthy indolence, and escaping, by a diversity of pleasures, 
from the weariness which everywhere pursues them, in pro- 
portion as they fly from it: Others, in a continual search, a- 
midst the cares of the world, for occupations which may de- 
liver them from themselves. It appears that time is a common 
enemy, against which all men have agreed to conspire: Their 
whole life is one continued and deplorable anxiety to rid them- 
selves of it. The happiest are those who best succeed in not 
feeling the weight of its duration: and the principal satisfac- 
tion they reap, either from frivolous pleasures or serious occu- 
pations, is the abridgement of days and moments, and deliver- 
ance from them, almost without a perception of their being 
passed. 

Time, that precious deposit confided to us by the Lord, is 
therefore become a burden which fatigues and oppresses us: 
We dread, as the greatest of evils, its deprivation for ever; and 
we almost equally dread the obligation to support its weariness 
and duration. It is a treasure which we would wish to re- 
tain for ever, yet which we cannot suffer to remain in our pos- 
session. 

This time, however, of which we make so little estimation, is - 
the only mean of our eternal salvation. We lose it without re- 
gret, which is a crime; we employ it only for worldly pur- 



Ssitar. VR] OF THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIMR 105 



poses, which is a madness. Let us employ the time which 
God allows us, because it is short: Let us employ it only in 
labouring for our salvation, because it is only given us that we 
may be saved; that is to say,, let us be sensible of the value of 
time, and let us lose it not] let us know the use of it, and em- 
ploy it only for the purpose it was given: By these means, we 
shall avoid both the dangers of a slothful and the inconveni- 
ences of a hurried life. This is the subject of the present dis- 
course. 

Part L Three circumstances, in general, decide upon the 
value of things among men: The great advantages which may 
accrue to us from them; the short space we have to enjoy 
them; and lastly, every hope destroyed of ever regaining them, 
if once lost. Now, behold, my brethren, the principal motives 
which ought to render time precious and estimable to every 
wiseman: In the first place, it is the price of eternity: In 
the second place, it is short; and we cannot make too much 
haste to reap the benefit of it: And, lastly, it is irreparable; 
for, once lost, it can never be regained. It is the price of 
eternity: Yes, my brethren, man, condemned to death by the 
sin of his birth, ought to receive life only to lose it, even 
from the moment he has received it. The blood alone of 
Jesus Christ has effaced this sentence of death and punishment 
pronounced against all mankind in the person of the first sin- 
ner: We live, though the offspring of a father condemned to 
death, and inheritors ourselves of his punishment, because the 
Redeemer died for us : The death of Jesus Christ is, therefore, 
the source, and the only claim of right we have to life; our 
days, our moments, are the first blessings which have flowed to 
us from his cross; and the time which we so vainly lose, is the 
price, however, of his blood, the fruit of, his death, and the 
merit of his sacrifice. 

Not only as children of Adam, we deserve no longer to live; 
but even all the crimes we have added to those of our birth are 
become new sentences of death against us. So many times as 
we have violated the law of the Author of life, so many times, 
from that moment, ought we to have lost it. 

Every sinner is, therefore, a child of death and anger; and 
every time the mercy of God has suspended, after each of our 
crimes, the sentence of condemnation and death, it is a new 
life, as it were, his goodness has granted, in order to allow us 
time to repair the criminal use we had hitherto made of our 
own. 

I even speak not of the diseases, accidents, and numberless 
dangers which so often have menaced our life; which so often 
we have seen to terminate that of our friends and nearest con- 
nexions; and from which his goodness has always delivered us. 
The life which we enjoy is like a perpetual miracle, therefore, 



3 06 ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. [Serm. VII. 



of his divine mercy: The time which is left to us is the conse- 
quence of an infinity of tender mercies and grace, which com- 
pose the thread and the train, as it were, of our life : Every mo- 
ment we breathe is like a new gift we receive from God; and 
to waste that time, and these moments, in a deplorable inuti- 
lity, is to insult that infinite goodness which has granted them 
to us, to dissipate an inestimable grace, which is not our due, 
and to deliver up to chance the price of our eternity. Behold, 
my brethren, the first guilt attached to the loss of time : It is a 
precious treasure left to us, though we no longer have any right 
to it, which is given to us for the purpose alone of purchasing 
the kingdom of heaven, and which we dissipate as a thing the 
most vile and contemptible, and of which we know not any use 
to make. 

In the world, we would regard that man as a fool, who, heir to 
a great fortune, should allow it to be wasted through want of 
care and attention, and should make no use of it, either to raise 
himself to places and dignities, which might draw him from ob- 
scurity, or in order to confirm to himself a solid establishment, 
which migl*t place him in future beyond the reach of any re- 
verse. 

But, my brethren, time is that precious treasure which we 
have inherited from our birth, and which the Almighty leaves 
to us through pure compassion: It is in our possession, and it 
depends upon ourselves to make a proper use of it. It is not 
in order to exalt ourselves to frivolous dignities here below, or 
to worldly grandeurs : Alas ! whatever passes away is too vile 
to be the price of time, which is itself the price of eternity: It 
is in order to be placed in the heavens above, at the side of Je- 
sus Christ; it is in order to separate us from the crowd of the 
children of Adam, above all the Caesars and kings of the earth, 
in that immortal society of the happy, who shall all be kings, 
and whose reign shall have no bounds but those of eternity. 

What madness, then, to make no use of a treasure so inesti- 
mable; in frivolous amusements to waste that time which may 
be the price of eternal salvation, and to allow the hopes of our 
immortality to be dissipated in smoke! Yes, my brethren, 
there is not a day, an hour, a moment, but which, properly em- 
ployed, may merit us heaven. A single day lost ought there- 
fore to leave us remorses a thousand times more lively and 
poignant than the failure of the greatest worldly prospects; 
yet, nevertheless, this time is a burden to us: Our whole life 
is only one continued science to lose it; and, in spite of all our 
anxieties to waste it, there always, however, remains more than 
we know how to employ; and yet, the thing upon the earth we 
have the smallest value for, is our time; our acts of kindness 
we reserve for our friends; our bounties for our dependents; 
our riches for our children and relations; our praises for those 
who appear worthy of them: Our time we give all to the 



Serm. VII.] ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. 107 



world; we expose it, as I may say, a prey to all mankind; they 
even do us a pleasure in delivering us from it: It is a weight, 
as it were, which we support in the midst of the world, while 
incessantly in search of some one who may ease us of its bur- 
den. In this manner time, that gift of God, that most precious 
blessing of his clemency, and which ought to be the price of our 
eternity, occasions all our embarrassments, all our wearinesses, 
and becomes the most oppressive burden of our life. 

But a second reason which makes us feel still more sensibly 
our absurdity in setting so little value upon the time the Al- 
mighty leaves to us, is, that not only it is the price of our eter- 
nity, but likewise it is short, and we cannot hasten too much to 
employ it to advantage. For, my brethren, had we even a long 
series of ages to exist upon the earth, that space would, in truth, 
be still too short to be employed in meriting everlasting happiness ; 
yet its duration would at least enable us to retrieve those acci- 
dental losses. The days and moments lost would at least form 
only a point, scarcely perceptible, in that long series of ages we 
should have to pass here below. But, alas ! our whole life is 
but an imperceptible point. The longest endures so little; our 
days and our years are shut up in such narrow limits, that we 
see not what we can have still to lose, in a space so short and 
rapid. We are only, as I may say, a moment upon the earth: 
like those fiery exhalations, which in the obscurity of night, 
are seen wandering in the air, we only appear to vanish in a 
moment, and be replunged for ever into our original and ever- 
lasting darkness: The exhibition we make to the world is but 
a flash, which is, extinguished almost in the same moment it ex- 
ists : We say it ourselves every day. Alas ! how can we take 
days and hours of rest from a life which is itself but a moment? 
And besides, if ye retrench from that moment all you are un- 
der the necessity of allowing to the indispensable necessities of 
the body, to the duties of your station, to unexpected events, 
and the inevitable complaisances due to society, what remains 
for yourself, for God, and for eternity? And are we not wor- 
thy of pity; we, who know not how to employ the little which 
remains to us, and who fly to the assistance of a thousand ar- 
tifices to abridge its duration? 

To the little time, my brethren, we have to live upon the 
earth, add the number of past crimes which we have to expiate 
in this short interval. How many iniquities are collected upon 
our heads since our first years: Alas! ten lives, like ours, 
would scarcely suffice to expiate a part of them: The time 
would still be too short; and it would be necessary to call upon 
the goodness of God to prolong the duration of our penance. 
Great God! what portion can remain to me for pleasures and 
indolence, in a life so short and so criminal as mine? What 
place, then, can frivolous sports and amusements find in an in- 



108 ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. [Serm. VII. 



terval so rapid* and which altogether would not suffice to ex- 
piate a single one of my crimes? 

Ah! my brethren, do we even think upon it? A criminal 
condemned to death, and to whom a single day is only allowed 
to endeavour toward obtaining his pardon, would he find hours 
and moments still to trifle away? Would he complain of the 
length of the time which the humanity and goodness of his 
judge had awarded him? Would he be embarrassed how to use 
it? Would he search for frivolous amusements to assist him to 
pass those precious moments which were left him to merit his 
pardon and deliverance? Would he not endeavour to profit by 
an interval so decisive with regard to his destiny? Would he 
not replace, by the anxiety, vivacity, and continuance of his 
exertions, what might be wanting from the brevity of the time 
allowed to him? Fools that we are! our sentence is pro- 
nounced; our guilt renders our condemnation certain : We are 
left a single day to shun the evil, and to change the rigour of 
our eternal decree: And this only day, this rapid day, we in- 
dolently pass in occupations vain, slothful, and puerile. 

This precious day is a burden to us, wearies us; we seek to 
abridge it; scarcely can we find amusements sufficient to fill 
the void; the evening arrives without our having made any 
other use of the day left to us than that of rendering ourselves 
still more worthy of the condemnation we had already merited. 
And, besides, my brethren, how do we know that the abuse of 
the day, left to us by the Almighty's goodness, will not oblige 
his justice to abridge and to cut off a portion of it? How many 
unexpected accidents may arrest us in a course so limited, and 
crop, in their fairest blossoms, the hopes of a longer life ! How 
many sudden and astonishing deaths do we see; and generally 
the just punishment of the unworthy use they had made of 
life ! What age has ever witnessed more of these melancholy 
examples? Formerly these accidents were rare and singular; 
at present they are events which happen every day. Whether 
it be, that our crimes have drawn down upon us this punish- 
ment; whether it be, that excesses unknown to our forefathers 
lead us to them : but at present they are the deaths most com- 
mon and frequent. Number, if you can, those of your rela- 
tions, friends, and connexions, whom a sudden death has sur- 
prised without preparation, repentance, or a moment allowed 
them to reflect upon themselves, upon that God whom they 
have offended, and upon those crimes which, far from detest- 
ing, they never had leisure sufficiently to be acquainted with. 

Will you tell us after this, that there are many spare mo- 
ments in the day; that we must contrive to amuse ourselves 
some way or another? 

There are many spare moments in the day ! But your guilt 
consists in leaving them in that frightful void: The days of the 



Serm. VIL] on THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. 109 



upright are always full. Spare moments in the day! But are 
your duties always fulfilled? Are your houses regulated, your 
children instructed, the afflicted relieved, the poor visited, the 
works of piety accomplished? Time is short; your obligations 
so infinite; and can you still find so many spare moments in 
the day? My God! how many holy characters have in soli- 
tude complained that their days passed too rapidly away; have 
borrowed from the night what the brevity of the day had taken 
from their labours and zeal; have lamented, even in the calm 
and leisure of their solitude, that sufficient time remained not 
for them to publish thy praises and eternal mercies: And we, 
charged with a multiplicity of cares; we, in the midst of the 
solicitudes and the engagements of the age, which absorb al- 
most all our days and our moments; we, responsible to our re- 
lations; to our children, to our friends, to our inferiors, to our 
superiors, to our stations, to our country, for such an infinity 
of duties^ we still find a void in our life; and the little which 
remains to us, we think too long to be employed in serving and 
blessing thy holy name ! 

But we are happy, you say, when we know how to amuse 
ourselves, and innocently to pass away the time. But how do 
you know that your course is not already run, and that you do 
not perhaps touch the fatal moment which commences your 
eternity? Does your time belong to you, to be disposed of as 
you please? Time itself passes away so soon; and are so 
many amusements necessary to assist it in passing still more 
rapidly? 

But is time given to you for nothing serious, great, and 
eternal; nothing worthy of the elevation and destiny of man? 
And the Christian and inheritor of heaven, is he upon the earth 
only to amuse himself? 

But are there not, you say, many innocent recreations m 
life? I grant there are many : but recreations suppose pains 
and cares, which have preceded them; while your whole life is 
one continued recreation. Recreations are permitted to those 
who, after fulfilling their duties, are under the necessity of af- 
fording some moments of relaxation, to the weakness of human 
nature : But you, if you have occasion for relaxation, it is from 
the continuance of your pleasures, and even what you call your 
recreations : It is from the rage of inordinate gaming, of which 
the duration and earnest attention necessary, besides the loss of 
time, render you incapable, on quitting it, of application to any 
other duty of your station. What recreation can you find in a 
lawless and boundless passion, which occupies almost your 
whole life, ruins your health, deranges your fortune, and ren- 
ders you the continual sport of a miserable chance? And is it 
not with such characters that we find neither order, rule, nor 
discipline? All serious duties forgotten; disorderly servants; 
children miserably educated; affairs declining; and public 



110 ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. [Serm. VII. 



scorn and contempt attached to their names and their unfor- 
tunate posterity? The passion of gaming is almost never un- 
accompanied; and to those of one sex especially, is always the 
source or the occasion of all the others: These are the recrea- 
tions you believe innocent, and necessary to fill up the empty 
moments of the day. 

Ah ! my brethren, how many of the reprobate, in the midst 
of their anguish and punishments, intreat from the mercy of 
God only one of those moments which we know not how to 
employ; and could their request be granted, what use would 
they not make of that precious moment? How many tears of 
compunction and penitence I How many prayers and supplica- 
tions, to soften the Father of mercies, and to induce his pater- 
nal feelings to restore to them his affection ! This only moment 
is nevertheless refused : Time, they are told, exists no more for 
them; and you find yourselves embarrassed with the little you 
are left? God will judge you, my brethren; and on the bed of 
death, and in that terrible hour which shall surprise you, in 
vain shall you demand a little more time; in vain shall you 
promise to God a more Christian use of what you will endea- 
vour to obtain: His justice, without pity, will cut the thread 
of your days; and that time, which now oppresses and em- 
barrasses you, shall then be denied. 

But in what our blindness here is still more conspicuous, is 
that not only the time which we lose with so much indifference 
and insensibility, is short and precious, but likewise irrepara- 
ble; for, once lost, it is for ever gone, without resource. 

I say irreparable: For, in \hejirst place, riches, honours, re- 
putation, and favour, though once lost, may again be retrieved, 
We may even replace each of these losses by other acquire- 
ments, which will repay us with usury; but the moments lost 
in inutility are so many means of salvation which we never 
again can possess, but which are for ever cut off from the num- 
ber which God, in his compassion, had allotted to us. Indeed, 
in a space so short as we have to live, there cannot be a doubt 
but that the Almighty had his particular designs with regard to 
each of our days and moments; that he hath marked the use 
we ought to have made of them; the connexion they were to 
have with our eternal salvation; and that, to each of them, he 
hath attached assistances of grace, in order to consummate the 
work of our sanctification. Now, these days and moments be- 
ing lost, the grace attached to them must be equally so : The 
moments of God are finished, and return no more : The course 
of his mercies is regulated: We believed they were only use- 
less moments we had lost; and with them we had lost inesti- 
mable succours of grace, which we find deducted from those 
the goodness of God had destined for us. 

In the second place, Irreparable, because every day, every 
moment, ought to advance us a step nearer heaven. Now, the 



Serm. VII.] ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. Ill 



days and moments lost leaving us in arrear, and the duration 
of our course being also determined, the end arrives when we 
are yet at a distance; when there is no longer time to supply 
the remainder of the career; or, at least, to regain the lost 
moments, and reach the goal, we must double our speed: In 
one day fill up the course of many years; make the most he- 
roic exertions; and hasten in a degree even beyond our strength: 
Proceed to excesses of holiness, which are miracles of grace, 
and of which the generality of men are incapable^ and con- 
summate, in a small interval, what ought to be the labour of a 
whole life. 

In the last place, Irreparable, with respect to the works of 
penance and reparation, of which, in a certain period of life, 
we are capable, but are no longer so, when we wait the infir- 
mities of a more advanced age. For, after all, it is in vain to 
say then, that God expects not impossibilities; that there is a 
penance for every age; and that religion does not wish us to 
hasten our days, under the pretext of expiating our crimes: 
It is you who have placed yourselves in this state of impossi- 
bility: Your sins diminish not your obligations: Guilt must 
be punished, in order to be effaced. The Almighty had allowed 
you both time and strength to satisfy this immutable and eter- 
nal law: This time you have wasted in accumulating new debts; 
this strength you have exhausted, either by new excesses, or 
at least without making any use of it, to further the designs of 
God respecting you: The Almighty must therefore do, what 
you have never done yourselves, and punish, after your death, 
the crimes you have never been inclined to expiate during your 
life. 

This is to say, in order to concentrate all these reflections, 
that with every moment of our life it is as with our death: 
We die only once; and from thence we conclude, that we must 
die in a proper state, because there is no longer a possibility of 
returning, to repair, by a second death, the evil of the first: 
In like manner, we only once exist, such and such moments ; 
we cannot return upon our steps, and by commencing a new 
road, repair the errors and faults of our first path: In like 
manner, every moment of our life which we sacrifice becomes 
a point fixed for our eternity; that moment lost, shall change 
no more: It shall eternally be the same; it will be recalled to 
us, such as we have passed it, and will be marked with that 
ineffaceable stamp. How miserable then, is our blindness, my 
brethren; we whose life is only one continued attention to lose 
the time which returns no more, and, with so rapid a course, 
flies to precipitate itself into the abyss of eternity ! 

Great God! Thou who art the sovereign dispenser of times 
and moments : Thou, in whose hands are our days and our years, 
with what eyes must thou behold us loosing and dissipating 
the moments of which thou alone knowest the duration; of 



118 ON THE EMPLOYMENT OP TIME. [Ssbm. VIL 



which, in irrevocable characters, thou hast marked the course 
and the measure; moments, which thou drawest from the trea- 
sure of thine eternal mercies, to allow us time for penitence; mo- 
ments which, everyday, thy justice presses thee to abridge, as a 
punishment for their abuse; moments which every day before 
our eyes, thou refusest to so many sinners, less culpable than 
we, whom a terrible death surprises and drags into the gulph of 
thine eternal vengeance; moments, in a word, which we shall 
not perhaps long enjoy, and of which thou soon intendest 
to terminate the melancholy career ! Great God ! behold the 
greatest and the best part of my life already past and wholly 
lost: In all my days, there has not hitherto been a single seri- 
ous one; a single day for thee, for my salvation, and for eterni- 
ty; my whole life is but a vapour, which leaves nothing real or 
solid in the hand of him who recals it. Shall I, to the end, drag 
on my days in this melancholy inutility ; in this weariness which 
pursues me, in the midst of my pleasures, and the efforts which 
unavailingly I make to avoid it? Shall the last hour surprise 
me loaded with the void of my whole years? And, in all my 
course, shall there be nothing serious or important but the last 
moment, which will terminate it for ever, and decide my ever- 
lasting destiny? Great God ! what a life for a soul destined to 
serve thee, called to the immortal society of thy Son and thy 
saints, enriched with thy gifts, and, in consequence of them, ca- 
pable of works worthy of eternity! What a life is that life 
which, in reality, is nothing, has nothing in view, and fills up 
a time which is decisive of its eternal destiny, in doing nothing, 
and reckoning as well passed those days and hours which im- 
perceptibly slip away! 

But if inutility be opposite to the price of time, irregularity 
and multiplicity of occupations are not less so to the proper 
order of time and to the Christian use we ought to make of it. 
You have just seen the dangers of a slothful, and I will now lay 
before you the inconveniences of a hurried life. 

Part II. To every thing we have hitherto said, my breth- 
ren, the majority of those who listen to me have no doubt se- 
cretly opposed, that their life is any thing but slothful and use- 
less; that scarcely can they suffice for the duties, good offices, 
and endless engagements of their stations; that they live in an 
eternal vicissitude of occupations arid business which absorbs 
their whole life; and that they think themselves happy when 
they can accomplish a moment for themselves, and enjoy, at 
leisure, the situation which their fortune denies to them. 

Now this, my brethren, is a new way of abusing time, still 
more dangerous than even inutility and indolence. In effect, 
the Christian use of time is not merely the filling up of all its 
moments; it is not of filling them up in order, and according 
io the will of the Lord, who gives them to us: The life of faith 



Serm. VIL] ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. 113 



is a life of regularity and wisdom: Fancy, passion, pride, and 
cupidity, are false principles of conduct, since they themselves 
are only a derangement of the mind and heart; and that order 
and reason ought to be our only guides. 

Nevertheless, the life of the majority of men is a life always 
occupied and always useless; always laborious, and always 
void: Their passions give birth to all their motions: These are 
the great springs which agitate men; make them run here and 
there like madmen; and leave them not a single moment's tran- 
quillity; and, in filling up all their moments, they seek not to 
fulfil their duties, but to deliver themselves up to their restless- 
ness, and to satisfy their iniquitous desires. 

But in what doth this order consist, which ought to regulate 
the measure of our occupations and to sanctify the use of our 
time? It consists, in the first place, in limiting ourselves to 
the occupations attached to our stations; in not seeking places 
and situations which may multiply them; and in not reckon- 
ing, among our duties, the cares and embarrassments which 
anxiety, or our passions, alone generate within us. Secondly, 
However agitated may be our situations, amidst all oar occupa- 
tions, to regard as the most essential, and the most privileged, 
those we owe to our salvation. 

I say, in the first place, not to reckon, amongst the occupa- 
tions which sanctify the use of our time, those which restless- 
ness or the passions alone generate. 

Restlessness : Yes, my brethren, we all wish to avoid our- 
selves: To the generality of men, nothing is more melancholy 
and disagreeable than to find themselves alone, and obliged to 
review their own hearts. As vain passions carry us away; as 
many criminal attachments stain us; and as many thousand 
illicit desires occupy every moment of our heart; in entering 
into ourselves, we find only an answer of death, a frightful 
void, cruel remorses, dark thoughts, and melancholy reflections. 
We search, therefore, in the variety of occupations and con- 
tinual distractions, an oblivion of ourselves: We dread leisure 
as the signal of weariness; and we expect to find, in the confu- 
sion and multiplicity of external cares, that happy intoxication 
which enables us to go on without perceiving it, and makes us 
no longer to feel the weight of ourselves. 

But, alas ! we deceive ourselves: Weariness is never found 
but in irregularity, and in a life of confusion, where every 
thing is out of its place : It is in living by hazard that we are 
a burden to ourselves; that we continually search after new 
occupations, and that disgust soon obliges us to repent that we 
ever sought for them; that we incessantly change our situation, 
in order to fly from ourselves; and, that wherever we go, we 
carry ourselves: In a word, that our whole life is but a diver- 
sified art to shun weariness, and a miserable talent to find it. 
Wherever order is not, weariness must necessarily be found; 

H 



114 ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. [Serm. VII. 



and, far from a life of irregularity and confusion being a remedy, 
on the contrary it is the most fruitful source and universal 
cause of it. 

The just souls who live in regularity; they who yield nothing 
to caprice and temper; whose every occupation is exactly where 
it ought to be: whose moments are filled up, according to theiF 
destination, and to the will of the Lord who directs them, find, 
in order, a perfect remedy against and protection from weari- 
ness. That wise uniformity in the practice of duties which 
appear so gloomy in the eyes of the world, is the source of their 
joy, and of that happy equality of temper which nothing can 
derange: Never embarrassed with the present time which stat- 
ed duties occupy: Never in pain with regard to the future, for 
which new duties are arranged: never delivered up to them- 
selves by the change of occupations which succeed each other; 
their days appear as moments, because every moment is in its 
place: Time hangs not upon them, because it always has its 
distinction and use; and in the arrangement of an uniform and 
occupied life they find that peace and that joy which the rest 
of men in vain search for in the confusion of a continual agita- 
tion. 

Restlessness, by multiplying our occupations, leaves us there- 
fore a prey to weariness and disgust; nor yet does it sanctify 
the use of our time: For if the moments, not regulated by the 
order of God, are moments lost, however occupied they may 
otherwise be; if the life of man ought to be a life of wisdom 
and regularity, where every occupation has its allotted place; 
what can be more opposite to such a life than this inconsis- 
tency, these eternal fluctuations in which restlessness makes 
us pass our time? But the passions which keep us in perpetual 
motion do not form for us more legitimate employments. 

Yes, my brethren, I know that it is only at a certain age of life 
that we appear occupied with frivolity and pleasures: more se- 
rious cares and more solid avocations succeed to the indolence 
and to the vain amusements of our younger years; and, after 
wasting our youth in sloth and in pleasures, we appropriate our 
maturity to our country, to fortune, and to ourselves; but still 
with respect to heaven we continue the same. I confess that we 
owe our services to our country, to our sovereign, and to the 
national 'cares; that amongst the number of duties prescribed to 
us by religion it places that of zeal for our sovereign and for 
the interest and glory of our country; and that religion alone 
can form faithful subjects, and citizens ever ready to sacrifice 
their all for the general good. But religion wishes not that 
pride and ambition should rashly plunge us in public affairs, 
and that we should anxiously endeavour, by all possible means, 
by intrigue and solicitations, to attain places, where, owing 
every thing to others, not a moment is left to ourselves: Re- 
ligion wishes us to dread these tumultuous situations; to give 



Serm. VII.] ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. 115 



ourselves up to them with regret and trembling, when the order 
of God and the authority of our masters call us to them, and 
were the choice left to us always to prefer the safety and leisure 
of a private station to the dangers and eclat of dignities and 
places. Alas ! we have a short time to exist upon the earth, 
and the salvation or eternal condemnation which awaits us is so 
near that every other care ought to be melancholy and burden- 
some to us; and every thing which diverts our attention from 
that grand object, for which we are allowed only a small por- 
tion of days, ought to appear as the heaviest misfortune. This 
is not a maxim of pure spirituality; it is the first maxim and 
the foundation of Christianity. 

Nevertheless, ambition, pride, and all our passions unite to 
render a private life insupportable to us. What in life we dread 
most is a lot and a station which leave us to ourselves, and do 
not establish us upon others. We consult neither the order of 
God, nor the views of religion, nor the dangers of a too-agitated 
situation, nor the happiness which faith points out in a private 
and tranquil station, where we have nothing but ourselves to 
answer for, and frequently not even our talents; we consult 
only our passions, and that insatiable desire of raising ourselves 
above our brethren; we wish to figure upon the stage of life, 
and become great personages, and upon a stage, alas ! which 
to-morrow shall disappear, and leave us nothing real but the 
puerile "of trouble and pain of having acted upon it. Even the 
more these stations appear surrounded with tumult and embar- 
rassment the more do they appear worthy of our pursuit: We 
wish to be in every thing : That leisure so dear to a religious 
soul to us appears shameful and mean: Every thing which di- 
vides us betwixt the public and ourselves; every thing which 
gives to others an absolute right over our time; every thing 
which plunges us into that abyss of cares and agitations, which 
credit, favour, and consideration drag after them, affects, at- 
tracts, and transports us. Thus, the majority of men incon- 
siderately create to themselves a tumultuous and agitated life, 
which the Almighty never required of them, and eagerly seek 
for cares where they cannot be in safety, unless the order of 
God had prepared them for us. 

Indeed, we sometimes hear them complaining of the endless 
agitations inseparable from their places; sighing for rest, and 
envying the lot of a tranquil and private station; repeating, 
that it should indeed be time to live for themselves, after hav- 
ing so long lived for others. But these are merely words of 
course: they seem to groan under the weight of affairs; but 
with much more uneasiness and grief would they support the 
weight of leisure and of a private condition : They employ one 
part of their life in struggling against each other for the tumult 
of places and employments, and the other they employ in la- 
menting the misfortune of having obtained them. It is a lan- 



116 ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. [Serm. VII. 



guage of vanity: they would wish to appear superior to their 
fortune; arid they are not so to the smallest reverse, or the 
slightest symptom of coldness which threatens them. Behold 
how our passions create occupations and embarrassments, which 
God required not, and deprive us of a time whose value we 
shall be ignorant of till we reach that moment when time 
finishes and eternity begins. 

Yet still, my brethren, in the midst of the endless occupations 
attached to your stations, were you to regard as the most pri- 
vileged those connected with your salvation, you would, in some 
measure at least, repair the dissipation of that portion of your 
life, which the world, and the cares of this earth, entirelv occu- 
py. But it is still on this point that our blindness is deplorable ; 
we cannot find time for our eternal salvation. That which we 
bestow on fortune, the duties of a charge, the good offices ex- 
pected from our station, the care of the body, and attention to 
dress; that which we give to friendship, society, recreation, and 
custom, all appear essential and indispensable: We even dare 
not encroach upon or limit these; we cany them beyond the 
bounds even of reason and necessity; and as life is too short, 
and our days too rapid to suffice for all, whatever we retrench 
is from the cares of our salvation: In the multiplicity of our 
occupations we are sure to sacrifice those which we ought to 
bestow on eternity. Yes, my brethren, in place of retrenching 
from our amusements, from the duties which ambition multi- 
plies, from the ceremonies which idleness alone has established, 
from the cares and attentions we bestow on a vain dress which cus- 
tom and effeminacy have rendered endless; in place of retrench- 
ing from these at least some little time every day> scarcely do 
they leave us some accidental remains which by chance have 
escaped from the world and pleasure; some rapid moments the 
world wishes not, with which we are perhaps embarrassed, and 
which we know not how to dispose of otherwise. So long as 
the world chooses to engage us; so long as it continues to offer 
pleasures, duties, trifles, and complaisances, we yield ourselves 
up to it with delight. When all is over, and we no longer know 
how to fill up our vacant hours, we then consecrate to some 
languid practices of religion those outcast moments which weari- 
ness or a deficiency of pleasures leaves us: Properly speaking, 
they are moments of recreation which we bestow upon ourselves 
rather than upon God; an interval we place between the world 
and us, in order to return to it with more relish, and breathe a 
little from the fatigue, the disgust, and the satiety which are 
the necessary consequences of a life devoted to the world and 
pleasures, which, prolonged beyond a certain measure, are im- 
mediately followed by weariness and lassitude. 

Such is the use which even persons who deck themselves 
out with a reputation for virtue make of their time. Their 
whole life is one continued and criminal preference given to the 



Serm. VIL] on the EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. 11? 



world, fortune, ceremony, and pleasures, above the business of 
their salvation : All is filled up by what they give to their mas- 
ters, friends, places and appetites, and nothing remains for God 
and for eternity. It would appear that time is given to us, in 
the first place, for the world, abmition, and earthly cares; and 
should any portion of it happen afterwards to remain, that we 
are entitled to praise when we bestow it on our salvation. 

Great God ! for what purpose dost thou leave us on the earth 
but to render ourselves worthy of thine eternal possession? 
Every thing we do for the world shall perish with it; whatso- 
ever we do for thee shall be immortal. All our cares and at- 
tentions here are in general for masters, ungrateful, unjust, dif- 
ficult to please, weak, and incapable of rendering us happy: 
The duties we render to thee are given to a Lord and Master, 
faithful, just, compassionate, almighty, and who alone can re- 
compense those who serve him: The cares of the earth, how- 
ever brilliant, are foreign to us: they are unworthy of us; it is 
not for them we are created; we ought only to devote ourselves 
to them as they pass, in order to satisfy the transitory ties they 
exact from us, and which connect us with mankind: The cares 
of eternity alone are worthy of the nobility of our hopes and 
fill all the grandeur and dignity of our destiny. Without the 
cares of salvation, those of this earth are profane and sullied; 
they are no longer but vain, fruitless, and almost always crimi- 
nal agitations: The cares of salvation alone consecrate and 
sanctify them, give to them reality, elevation, the price and the 
merit which they wanted. All other cares wound, trouble, har- 
den, and render us miserable, but the duties we render to thee 
leave us a real and heartfelt joy : They strengthen, calm, and 
console us, and even soften the anguish and bitterness of the 
others. In a word, we owe ourselves to thee, O my God! be- 
fore masters, superiors, friends, or connexions. Thou alone hast 
the first right over our hearts and reason, which are the gifts of 
thy liberal hand; it is for thee, therefore, that in the first place 
we ought to make use of them: and we are Christians before we 
are princes, subjects, public characters, or any thing else on the 
earth. 

You will perhaps tell us, my brethren, that, in fulfilling the 
painful and endless duties attached to your station, you believe 
that you serve God, accomplish your measure of righteousness, 
and labour toward your salvation. I grant it; but we must fulfil 
these duties according to the views of the Lord, from motives 
of faith, and in the true spirit of religion and piety. God reckons 
only what we do for him; of all our pains, fatigues, submissions, 
and sacrifices, he accepts only of those which are offered to his 
glory and not to our own; and our days are Only full in his 
sight when they are full for eternity. All actions, which have 
nothing for their object but the world; a fame limited to this 
earth; a perishable fortune; some praises they may attract to 



118 ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. [Sebm. VII. 



us from men, or some degree of grandeur and reputation to 
which they may raise us here below, are nothing in his presence, 
or, at least, are only puerile amusements, unworthy of the ma- 
jesty of his regards. 

Thus, my brethren, how different are the judgments of God 
from those of the world! In the world we call beautiful that 
splendid life in which great actions are numbered, victories 
gained, difficult negotiations concluded, undertaking success- 
fully conducted, illustrious employments supported with repu- 
tation, eminent dignities acquired by important services, and 
exercised with glory; a life which passes into history, fills the 
public monuments, and of which the remembrance shall be pre- 
served to the latest posterity : Such, according to the world, is 
a beautiful life. But if in all this, they have sought more their 
own than the glory of God; if they have had nothing more in 
view than to erect to themselves a perishable edifice of grandeur 
on the earth; in vain shall they have furnished a splendid career 
to the eyes of men ; in the eyes of God, it is a life lost : In vain 
shall history record us; we shall be effaced from the book of 
life, and from the eternal histories : In vain shall our actions be 
the admiration of ages to come; they shall not be written on 
the immortal columns of the heavenly temple. In vain shall 
we have acted a dignified part upon the stage of all earthly ages ; 
in the eternal ages we shall be as those who never were : In vain 
shall our titles and dignities be preserved upon the marble and 
brass: as the fingers of men have written them, they shall perish 
with them; and what the finger of God shall have written will 
alone endure as long as liiniself. In vain shall our life be pro- 
posed as a model to the ambition of our descendants; its reality 
existing only in the passions of men from the moment they shall 
cease to have passions and the objects winch inflame them shall 
be annihilated, this life shall be nothing, and shall be replun- 
ged into nonentity, with the world which admire it. 

For, candidly, my brethren, can you really wish that in that 
awful and terrible day, when righteousness itself shall be judg- 
ed, the Almighty should give you credit for all the pains, cares, 
and disgusts you have experienced and devoured, in order to 
raise yourselves in the world? That he should regard, as well 
employed, the time you have sacrificed to the world, fortune, 
glory, and the elevation of your name and race, as if you were 
upon the earth only for yourselves? That he should place, a- 
mong the number of your works of salvation, those which have 
only had for principle ambition, pride, envy, and self-interest; 
and that he should reckon your -vices amongst your virtues. 

And what will you be able to say to him on the bed of death, 
when he shall enter into judgment with you, and demand an 
account of the time which he had oiily granted you to be em- 
ployed in glorifying and serving him? Will you say to him. 
Lord, I have gained many victories; I have usefully and glo- 
riously served my prince and country: I have established to 



Serm. VIL] on THE EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. 119 



myself a great name amongst men? Alas! you have never 
been able to gain a victory over yourself; you have usefully 
served the kings of the earth, and you have neglected, with 
contempt, the service of the King of kings. You have estab- 
lished to yourself a great name amongst men, and your name 
is unknown amongst the chosen of God; time lost for eternity. 
Will you say to him, I have conducted the most difficult ne- 
gotiations; I have concluded the most important treaties; I 
have managed the interests and fortunes of princes; I have been 
in the secrets and in the councils of kings? Alas! you have 
concluded treaties and alliances with men, and you have a thou- 
sand times violated the holy covenant you have entered into 
with God; you have managed the interests of princes, and you 
have never known how to manage the interests of your salvation : 
You have entered into the secrets of kings, and you have never 
been ignorant of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven; time 
lost for eternity. Will you say to him, My whole life has been 
only an incessant toil and a painful and continued occupation? 
Alas ! you have always toiled, and you have never been able to do 
any thing to save your soul; time lost for eternity. Will you say 
to him, I have established my children in the world; I have ex- 
alted my relations; I have been useful to my friends; I have 
augmented the patrimony of my ancestors? Alasl you have 
bequeathed great establishments to your children, and you have 
not left them the fear of the Lord, by bringing them up and esta- 
blishing them in faith and in piety: You have augmented the 
patrimony of your ancestors, and you have dissipated the gifts 
of grace and the patrimony of Jesus Christ; time lost for eterni- 
ty. Will you say to him, I have made the most profound 
studies; I have enriched the public with useful and curious 
works; I have perfected the sciences by new discoveries; I im- 
proved my great talents and rendered them useful to mankind? 
Alas! the great talent confided to you was that of faith and 
grace, of which you have made no use: You have rendered 
yourself learned in the sciences of men, and you have always 
been ignorant in the science of the holy; time lost for eternity. 
In a word, will you tell him, I have passed my life in fulfilling 
the duties and good offices of my station; I have gained friends; 
I have rendered myself useful and agreeable to my masters? 
Alas ! you have had friends to boast of on the earth, and you 
have acquired none to yourself in heaven; you have made every 
exertion to please men, and you have done nothing to please 
the Almighty; time lost for eternity. 

No, my brethren, what a frightful void the greatest part of 
men, who had governed states and empires, who appeared 
to regulate the whole universe, and had filled in it the most 
distinguished places; -who were the subjects of every conversa- 
tion, and of the desires and hopes of men; who engrossed, al- 
most alone, the whole attentions of the earth; what a frjg^tfu] 



120 



THE CERTAINTY OF [Serm. VIII. 



void will they, on the bed of death, find their whole life to be? 
whilst the days of the pious and retired soul, regarded by them 
as obscure and indolent, shall appear full, complete, occupied, 
marked each by some victory of faith, and worthy of being cele- 
brated by the eternal songs. 

Meditate, my brethren, on those holy truths : Time is short ; 
it is irreparable: It is the price of your eternal felicity \ it is 
given to you only in order to render you worthy of that felicity: 
Calculate, therefore, what portion of it you should bestow on the 
world, pleasures, fortune, and on your salvation. My brethren, 
says the apostle, time is short; Let us therefore use the world, 
as not abusing it; let us possess our riches, places, dignities, 
and titles, as though we possessed them not; let us enjoy the 
favour of our superiors, and the esteem of men, as though we 
enjoyed them not; they are only shadows, which vanish and 
leave us for ever; and let us only reckon upon as real, in our 
whole life, the moments which we have employed for heaven. 



SERMON VIII. 
THE CERTAINTY OF A FUTURE STATE. 

Matth. xxv. 46. 

And these shall go away into everlasting punishme?it ; but the righteous 
into life eternal. 

Behold, to what at last shall be brought the desires, hopes, 
councils, and enterprises of men: Behold, upon what at last 
shall split the vain reflections of sages and freethinkers, the 
doubts and eternal uncertainties of unbelievers, the vast projects 
of conquerors, the monuments of human glory, the cares of ambi- 
tion, the distinction of talents, the disquietudes of fortune, the 
prosperity of empires, and all the insignificant revolutions of 
the earth. Such shall be the awful conclusion which will un- 
ravel the mysteries of Providence on the divers lots of the 
children of Adam, and justify its conduct in the government of 
the universe. This life is, therefore, but a rapid instant, and 
the commencement of an eternal futurity. Torments without 
end, or the delights of an immortal felicity, shall be our lot as 
well as that of all men. 

Nevertheless, the view of this grand object, which formerly 
had been able to startle the ferocity of tyrants, to shake the for- 
titude of philosophers, to disturb the effeminacy and voluptuous- 



Serm. VIIL] A FUTURE STATE. 



121 



ness of Caesars, to soften the most barbarous nations, to form so 
many martyrs, to people the deserts, and to bring the whole 
universe submissive to the yoke of the cross; this image, so 
terrifying, is now almost destined to alarm the timidity of mere- 
ly the common people. These grand objects are become like 
vulgar paintings, which we dare no longer expose to the false 
delicacy of the great and connoissieurs of the world; and the 
only fruit we generally reap from this sort of discourses, is to 
make it be inquired, perhaps, after quitting them, whether every 
thing shall take place as we have said. 

For, my brethren, we live in times in which the faith of many 
has been wrecked; in which a wretched philosophy, like a mor- 
tal venom, spreads in secret and undertakes to justify abomina- 
tions and vices, against the belief of future punishment and re- 
wards. This evil has passed from the palaces of the great 
even to the people, and everywhere the piety of the just is in- 
sulted by the discourses of irreligion and the maxims of free- 
thinking. 

And certainly, I am not surprised that dissolute men should 
doubt of a future state, and endeavour to combat or to weaken a 
truth so capable of disturbing their criminal sensualities. It 
is horrible to look forward to everlasting misery. The world 
has no pleasure which can endure a thought so shocking; conse- 
quently, it has always endeavoured to efface it from the heart 
and mind of man. It well knows, that the belief of a future 
state is a troublesome check on the human passions, and that it 
will never succeed in making tranquil and resolute libertines, 
without having first made unbelievers. 

Let us deprive, then, the corruption of the human heart of 
so wretched and weak a support: Let us prove to dissolute 
souls that they shall survive their debaucheries; that all dies 
not with the body; that this life shall finish their crimes but not 
their misery ; and, more completely to confound impiety, let us 
attack it in the vain pretexts on which it depends. 

1st. Who knows, say the impious, that all dies not with us? 
Is that other life, of which we are told, quite certain? Who has 
ever returned to inform us of it ? 

2dly. It is worthy of the majesty of God, say they again, to 
demean himself by any attention to what passes among men? 
What matters it to him, that worms of the earth, like us, mur- 
der, deceive, and tear each other, live in luxury or in temper- 
ance? Is it not presumptuous in any man to suppose that an 
Almighty God is occupied with him? 

Lastly. What likelihood, add they, that God, having made 
man such as he is, will punish, as crimes, inherent inclinations 
to pleasure which nature has given us. Behold the philosophy 
of the voluptuary; the uncertainty of a future state; the majes- 
ty of God, which a vile creature cannot offend; and the weak- 



122 



THE CERTAINTY OF [Serai. VIII. 



ness of man, which, being born with him, he would be unjust 
of it to constitute a crime. 

Let us then prove, in the first place, against the uncertainty 
of the impious, that the truth of a future state is justified by 
the purest lights of reason: Secondly, against the unworthy 
idea, grounded upon the greatness of God, that this truth is 
justified by his wisdom and glory. Lastly, against the pretext, 
drawn from the weakness of man, that it is justified even by 
the testimony of his own conscience. The certainty of a future 
state; the necessity of a future state; the inward acknowledge- 
ment of a future state. Behold the subject and arrangement of 
my discourse. 

O God! attend not to the insults which the blasphemies of 
impiety offer to thy glory; regard only, and see of what reason 
is capable, when thy light is withdrawn. In the wickedness of 
the human mind, behold all the severity of thy justice, when it 
abandons it, that the more I expose the foolish blasphemies of 
the impious soul, the more may he become, in thy sight, an 
object worthy of thy pity, and of the treasures of thine in- 
finite mercy. 

Part I. It surely is melancholy to have to justify, before 
believers, the most consolatory truth of faith; to come to prove 
to men, to whom Jesus Christ has been declared, that their 
being is not a wild assemblage, and the wretched offspring of 
chance; that a wise and an Almighty Artificer has presided 
at our formation and birth; that a spark of immortality ani- 
mates our clay; that a portion of us shall survive ourselves; 
and that, on quitting this earthly mansion, our soul shall return 
to the bosom of God, from whence it came, and go to inhabit 
the eternal region of the living, where to each one shall be 
rendered according to his works. 

It was with this truth that Paul began to announce faith be- 
fore the Athenian judges. We are the immortal race of God, 
said he to that assembly of sages, and he has appointed a day to 
judge the universe. By that the Apostles spread the first prin- 
ciples of the doctrine of salvation, through infidel and corrupted 
nations. But we, who come after the revolution of ages, when 
the plenitude of nations has entered into the church, when the 
whole universe has professed to believe, when all the mysteries 
have been cleared up, all the prophecies accomplished, Jesus 
Christ glorified, the path of heaven laid open; we, who appear 
in these latter times, when the day of the Lord is so much 
nearer than when our fathers believed; Alas! what ought our 
ministry to be, unless to dispose believers for that grand hope, 
and to instruct them to hold themselves in readiness to appear 
before Jesus Christ, who will quickly come; far from having 



Serm. VIII.] 



A FUTURE STATE. 



128 



still to combat these shocking and foolish maxims, which the 
first preaching of the gospel had effaced from the universe. 

The pretended uncertainty of a future state is, then, the 
grand foundation of the security of unbelievers. We know, 
nothing, say they, of that other world of which you tell us so 
much. None of the dead have ever returned to inform us; 
perhaps there is nothing beyond the grave: Let us enjoy, 
therefore, the present, and leave to chance a futurity which 
either exists not or is meant to be concealed from our know- 
ledge. . . . 

Now, I say, that this uncertainty is suspicious in the princi- 
ple which produces it, foolish on the proofs on which it depends, 
and frightful in its consequences. Refuse me not here your 
attention. 

Suspicious in the principle which produces it. For, how 
has this uncertainty of a future state been formed in the mind 
of the unbeliever? It requires only to trace the origin of an 
opinion, to know whether the interests of truth, or the passions, 
have established it on the earth. 

At his birth, the impious man bore the principles of natural 
religion common to all men: He found written on his heart a 
law, which forbade violence, injustice, treachery, and every ac- 
tion to another, which he would not have done to himself: edu- 
cation fortified these sentiments of nature; he was taught to 
know a God, to love and to fear him; virtue was shown to 
him in the rules; it was rendered amiable to him in the ex- 
amples; and though, within himself, he felt inclinations in 
opposition to duty, yet, when he yielded to their seductions, 
his heart secretly espoused the cause of virtue against his own' 
weakness. 

Thus did the impious man at first live on the earth: With 
the rest of mankind, he adored a Supreme Being; respected 
his laws; dreaded his chastisements; and expected his promises. 
Whence comes it, then, that he no longer acknowledges a God; 
that crimes appear to him as human policies; hell a vulgar pre- 
judice; a future state a chimera; and the soul a spark, which is 
extinguished with the body? By what exertion has he attained 
to the knowledge of things so new and so surprising? By 
what means has he succeeded to rid himself of these ancient 
prejudices, so rooted among men, so consistent with the feel- 
ings, of his heart and the lights of reason? Has he searched 
into and maturely examined them? Has he adopted every solid 
precaution, which an affair, the most important of life, requires? 
Has he withdrawn himself from the commerce of men, in so- 
litude, to allow leisure for reflection and study ! Has he puri- 
fied his heart, lest the passions may have misled him? What 
anxious attentions and solicitude to investigate the truth are 
required, to reject the first feelings which the soul has imbibed! 

Listen, my brethren, and adore the justice of God on these 



124 



THE CERTAINTY OF [Serm. VIII. 



corrupted hearts whom he delivers up to the vanity of their 
own judgment. In proportion as his manners become dissolute, 
the rules have appeared suspicious; in proportion as he became 
debased, he has endeavoured to persuade himself that man is 
like the beast. He is become impious, only by shutting up 
every avenue which might lead him to the truth; by no longer 
regarding religion as an important concern; by searching into 
it only for the purpose of dishonouring it by blasphemies and 
sacrilegious witticisms; he is become impious, only by seek- 
ing to steel himself agajnst the cries of his own conscience, 
and delivering himself up to the most infamous gratifications. 
It is by that path that he has attained to the wonderful and 
sublime science of unbelief; it is to these grand efforts that he 
owes the discovery of a truth, of which the rest of men before 
him had either been ignorant, or had detested. 

Behold the source of unbelief, the corruption of the heart. 
Yes, my brethren, find me, if you can, men wise, temperate, 
pure, regular, and lovers of truth, who believe not a God, who 
look forward to no future state, who look upon adulteries, abo- 
minations, and incests, as the inclinations and innocent pastimes 
of nature. If the world has seen impious characters, who 
bore the semblance of wisdom and temperance, it was either 
that they better concealed their irregularities, in order to give 
more credit to their impiety, or the satiety of pleasure which 
had brought them to that feigned temperance : Debauchery 
had been the original source of their irreligion; their hearts 
were corrupted before their faith was wrecked; they had an 
interest to believe that all dies with the body before they suc- 
ceeded in persuading themselves of it; and a long indulgence 
of luxury had fully disgusted them with guilt, but had not 
rendered virtue more amiable to them. 

What consolation for us who believe that we must first re- 
nounce probity, modesty, manners, and all the feelings of hu- 
manity, before we can renounce faith; and, to be no longer 
Christian, must first cease to be man ! 

Behold, then, the uncertainty of the impious, already sus- 
picious in its principle; but, secondly, it is foolish in the proofs 
on which it depends. 

For surely, very decisive and convincing proofs must be re- 
quired to make us espouse the cause of unbelief, and to render 
us tranquil on what we are told of an eternal state to come. 
It is not natural that man would hazard an interest so serious 
as that of eternity on light and frivolous proofs; still less so, 
that he would thereon abandon the general opinion, the belief 
of his fathers, the religion of all ages, the agreement of all na- 
tions, and the prejudices of his education, had he not, as it 
were, been forced to it by the evidence of the truth. Unless 
absolutely convinced that all dies with the body, nothing can 
bear a comparison with the madness and folly of the unbeliever. 



Sebm. VIIL] A FUTURE STATE. 



Now, is he completely convinced? What are the grand reasons 
which have determined him to adopt this vile cause? We know 
not, says he, what happens in that other world of which you 
tell us: the good die equally as the wicked; man as the beast; 
and no more returns, to say which was in the error. Press him 
a little further, and you will be shocked to see the weakness of 
unbelief; vague discourses, hackneyed suspicions, everlasting 
uncertainties, and chimerical suppositions, on which nobody in 
their senses would wish to risk the happiness or disquiet of a 
single day, and upon which he, however, hazards an eternity. 

Behold the insurmountable proofs which the freethinker . 
opposes to the belief of the universe; hehold that evidence, 
which, in his mind, prevails over all that is most clear and 
most established on the earth. We know nothing of what 
passes in that other world of which you tell us. O man! 
open here thine eyes. A single doubt is sufficient to render 
thee impious, and all the proofs of religion are too weak to 
make thee a believer. Thy mind hesitates to believe in a 
future state, and, in the mean time, thou livest as though there 
were none. The only foundation thou hast for thine opinion, 
is thine uncertainty, and thou reproachest to us, that faith is a 
vulgar credulity! 

But I ask, On which side here is credulity? Is it on that of 
the freethinker or the believer? The latter believes in a future 
state, on the authority of the divine writings, that is to say, 
the book, without contradiction, which most deserves belief; 
on the deposition of holy men, that is to say, just, pure, and 
miraculous characters, who have shed their blood to render 
glory to the truth, and to that doctrine of which the conver- 
sion of the universe has rendered a testimony that to the end of 
ages shall rise up against the impious; on the accomplishment 
of the prophecies, that is to say, the only character of truth 
which the impostor cannot imitate; on the tradition of all ages, 
that is to say, on facts which, since the creation of the world, 
have appeared certain to all the greatest characters, the most ac- 
knowledged just men, the wisest and most civilized nations the 
universe could ever boast of; in a word, on proofs at least pro- 
bable. The freethinker denies a futurity on a simple doubt, a 
mere suspicion. Who knows it? says he; who has returned 
from it? He has no argument, either solid or decisive, to over- 
turn the truth of a future state. For, let him avow it, and 
then will we submit. He only mistrusts that there be any thing 
after this life, and upon that he believes that all dies with him. 

Now I demand, Which here is the credulous? Is it he, who, 
in support of his belief, has whatever is probable among men, 
and most calculated to make impression on reason; or he 
who is resolved to deny a future state, on the weakness of a 
simple doubt? Nevertheless, the freethinker imagines that he 
exerts his reason more than the believer; he looks down upon 



126 



THE CERTAINTY OF [Serm. VIII. 



us as weak and credulous men ; and lie considers himself as a 
superior genius, exalted above all vulgar prejudices, and whom 
reason alone, and not the public opinion, determines. O God ! 
how terrible art thou, when thou deliverest up a sinner to his 
own infatuation ! and how well thou knowest to draw glory to 
thyself even from the efforts which thine enemies make to 
oppose it. 

But I go still further: When, even in the doubt, formed by 
the unbeliever, of a future state, the arguments should be equal, 
and the trifling uncertainties, which render him uncredulous, 
should balance the solid and evident truths which promise im- 
mortality to us; I say, that, even in an equality of proofs, he 
at least ought to wish that the opinion of faith, with regard to 
the nature of our soul, were true; an opinion which is so honour- 
able to man ; which tells him that his origin is celestial and 
his hopes eternal; he ought to wish, that the doctrine of impiety 
were false; a doctrine so melancholy, so humiliating to man; 
which confounds him with the beast; which makes him live 
only for the body; gives him neither purpose, destination, nor 
hope; and limits his lot to a small number of rapid, restless, 
and sorrowful days, which he passes on the earth: All things 
equal, a reason born with any degree of elevation would prefer 
being deceived by what is honourable to itself rather than 
adopt a side so disgraceful to its being. What a soul, then, 
must the unbeliever have received from nature, to prefer, in so 
great an inequality of proofs, the belief that he is created only 
for this earth, and favourably to regard himself as a vile assem- 
blage of dirt and the companion of the ox and bull. What do 
I say? What a monster in the universe must be the unbeliever, 
who mistrusts the general belief, only because it is too glorious 
for his nature; and believes, that the vanity of men has alone 
introduced it on the earth, and has persuaded them that they 
are immortal. 

But no, my brethren ! These men of flesh and blood, with 
reason reject the honour which religion does to their nature, 
and persuade themselves that their soul is merely of earth, and 
that all dies with the body. Sensual, dissolute, and effeminate 
men, who have no other check than a brutal instinct; no other 
rule than the vehemence of their desires; no other occupation 
than to awaken, by new artifices, the cupidity already satiated; 
men of that character can have little difficulty to believe that no 
principle of spiritual life exists within them; that the body is 
their only being; and, as they imitate the manners of beasts, 
they are pardonable in attributing to themselves the same nature. 
But let them not judge of all men by themselves: there are still 
on the earth chaste, pure, and temperate souls; let them not as- 
cribe to nature the shameful tendencies of their own mind; let 
them not degrade humanity in general, because they have un- 
worthily debased themselves; let them seek out among men 



Serm. VIII.] A FUTURE STATE. 



127 



such as themselves; and, finding that they are almost single in 
the universe, they shall then see that they are rather monsters 
than the ordinary productions of nature. 

Besides, not only is the freethinker foolish, because that, even 
in an equality of proofs, his heart and glory should decide him 
in favour of faith, but likewise his own interest: For, as I have 
already said, What does he risk by believing? What disagree- 
able consequence will follow his mistake? He will live with 
honour, probity, and innocence; he will be mild, affable, just, 
sincere, religious, a generous friend, a faithful husband, and an 
equitable master; he will moderate his passions, which would 
otherwise have occasioned all the misfortunes of his life; he will 
abstain from pleasures and excesses which would have prepared 
for him a painful and premature old age or a deranged fortune; 
he will enjoy the character of a virtuous man, and the esteem 
of mankind; — Behold what he risks. When all should even 
finish with this life, that surely is still the way to pass it with 
happiness and tranquillity; such is the only inconveniency I 
can find. If no eternal recompense shall follow, what will he 
have lost by expecting it? He has lost some sensual and mo- 
mentary gratifications, which would soon have either fatigued 
him by the disgust which always follows their enjoyment, or 
tyrannized over him by the new desires they light up: He has 
lost the wretched satisfaction of being, for the instant he ap- 
peared on the earth, cruel, unnatural, voluptuous, without faith, 
morals, or constancy, perhaps despised and disgraced in the 
midst of his own people. I can see no other misfortune; he 
sinks back to his original non-existence, and his error has no 
other consequence. 

But if there is a future state, and he should deceive himself 
in rejecting faith, what does he not risk? The loss of eternal 
riches; the possession of thy glory, O my God! which would 
for ever have rendered him happy. But even that is only the 
commencement of his misery; he goes to experience punishment 
without end or measure, an eternity of horror and wrath. Now, 
compare these two destinies; what party here will the free- 
thinker adopt? Will he risk the short duration of his days, or a 
whole eternity? Will he hold by the present, which must finish 
to-morrow, and in which he even cannot be happy? Will he 
tremble at a futurity, which has no other limits than eternity 
and can never finish but with God himself? Where is the pru- 
dent man, who in an uncertainty even equal, durst here ba- 
lance? And what name' shall we give to the unbeliever, who, 
with nothing in his favour but frivolous doubts, while on the 
side of truth, beholding the authority, example, prescription, 
proof, and voice of all ages, the entire world, singly adopts the 
wretched cause of unbelief ; dies tranquil, as though he were no 
longer to have existence; leaves his eternal destiny in the hands 
of chance, and carelessly prepares to encounter so awful a scene. 



128 



THE CERTAINTY OF [Sbrm. VIII. 



O God! is this a man conducted by cool reason? or, is it a 
madman, who looks forward to no resource but despair? The 
uncertainty of the freethinker is therefore foolish in the proofs 
on which he depends. 

But, lastly, it is still more dreadful in its consequences. And 
here, my brethren, allow me to lay aside the deep reasonings of 
erudition and doctrine; I wish to speak only to the conscience 
of the unbeliever, and to confine myself to the proofs which his 
own feelings acknowledge. 

Now, if all shall finish with us, if man have nothing to ex- 
pect after this life, and that here is our country, our origin, and 
the only happiness we can promise ourselves, why are we not 
happy? If only created for the pleasures of the senses, why are 
they unable to satisfy us? and why do they always leave a 
fund of weariness and sorrow in the heart? If man have no- 
thing superior to the beast, why, like it, do not his days flow on 
without care, uneasiness, disgust, or sorrow, in sensual and car- 
nal enjoyments? If man have no other felicity to expect than 
merely a temporal happiness, why is he unable to find it on the 
earth? Whence comes it that riches serve only to render him 
uneasy; that honours fatigue him; that pleasures exhaust him; 
that the sciences, far from satisfying, confound and irritate his 
curiosity; that reputation constrains and embarrasses him; that 
all these united cannot fill the immensity of his heart, and still 
leave him something to wish for? All other beings, contented 
with their lot, appear happy in their way in the situation the 
Author of nature has placed them; the stars, tranquil in the 
firmament, quit not their station to illuminate another world; 
the earth, regular in its movements, shoots not upwards to oc- 
cupy their place; the animals crawl in the fields, without envy- 
ing the lot of man, who inhabits cities and sumptuous palaces; 
the birds carol in the air without troubling themselves whether 
there be happier creatures in the earth than themselves; all are 
happy, as I may say; every thing in nature is in its place: Man 
alone is uneasy and discontented; man alone is a prey to his 
desires, allows himself to be torn by fears, finds his punishment 
in his hopes, and becomes gloomy and unhappy in the midst 
even of his pleasures: Man alone can meet with nothing here 
to fix his heart. 

Whence comes this, O man? Must it not be that here thou 
art not in tlry place; that thou art made for heaven; that thy 
heart is greater than the world; that the earth is not thy coun- 
try; and that whatever is not God is nothing to thee? Answer, 
if thou canst, or rather question thy heart, and thou wilt be^ 
lieve. 

2dly. If all die with the body, who has been able to persuade 
all men, of every age, and of even' country, that their soul was 
immortal? From whence has this strange idea of immortality 
descended to the human race? How could an opinion, so dis- 



Sbrm. VIIL] A FUTURE STATE. 



129 



tant from the nature of man, were he born only for the func- 
tions of the senses, have pervaded the earth? For if man, like 
the beast, be created only for the present, nothing ought to be 
more incomprehensible to him than even the idea of immortali- 
ty. Could machines of clay, whose only object should be a sen* 
sual happiness, have ever been able to form, or to find in them- 
selves, an opinion so exalted, an idea so sublime? Nevertheless, 
this opinion, so extraordinary, is become that of all men; this 
opinion, so opposite even to the senses, since manlike the beast, 
dies wholly, in our sight is established on the earth; this opi- 
nion, which ought not to have even found an inventor in the 
universe, has been received with a universal docility of belief 
amongst all nations; the most savage as the most cultivated; 
the most polished as the most brutal; the most incredulous as 
the most submissive to faith. 

For, go back to the beginning of ages, examine all nations, 
read the history of kingdoms and empires, listen to those who 
return from the most distant isles; the immortality of the soul 
has always been, and still is, the belief of every people on the 
face of the earth. The knowledge of one God may have been 
obliterated; his glory, power, and immensity, may have been 
effaced, as I may say, from the hearts and minds of men; obsti- 
nate and savage nations may still live without worship, religion, 
or God, in this world; but they all look forward to a future 
state: Nothing has ever been able to eradicate the opinion of 
the immortality of the soul; they all figure to themselves a re- 
gion which our souls shall inhabit after death; and, in forgetting 
God, they have never discarded the idea of that provision for 
themselves. 

Now, whence comes it that men so different in their disposi- 
tions, worship, country, opinions, interests and even figure, 
that scarcely do they seem of the same species with each other, 
unanimously agree, however, on this point, and expect immor- 
tality? There is no collusion here; for how is it possible to as- 
semble together men of all countries and ages? It is not a pre- 
judice of education; for manners, habits, and worship, which 
are generally the consequences of prejudices, are not the same 
among all nations ; the opinion of immortality is common to all. 
It is not a sect; for besides that it is the universal religion of 
the world, that tenet has had neither head nor protector : Men 
have adopted it themselves, or rather nature has taught them to 
know it without the assistance of teachers; and, since the begin- 
ning of things, it alone has passed from father to son, and has 
been always received as an indisputable truth. O thou, who 
believest thyself to be only a mass of clay! quit the world, 
where thou findest thyself single in belief; go, and in other re- 
gions search for men of another species, and similar to the 
beast: or rather be struck with horror to find thyself single, as 
it were, in the universe, in revolt against nature, and disavow- 

i 



130 



THE CERTAINTY OF [Serm. VIII. 



ing thine own heart, and acknowledge, in an opinion common to 
all men, the general impression of the Author who has formed 
them all. 

Lastly. And with this proof I conclude : The universal fel- 
lowship of men, the laws which unite one to the other, the 
most sacred and inviolable duties of civil life, are all founded 
only on the certainty of a future state. Thus, if all die with the 
body, the universe must adopt their laws, manners, and habits, 
and a total change must take place in every thing. If all die 
with the body, the maxims of equity, friendship, honour, good 
faith, and gratitude, are only popular errors; since we owe no- 
thing to men who are nothing to us, to whom no general bond 
of worship and hope unites us, who will to-morrow sink back 
to their original nonentity, and who are already no more. fr 
all die with us, the tender names of child, parent, father, friend, 
and husband, are merely theatrical appellations and a mockery; 
since friendship, even that springing from virtue, is no longer a 
lasting tie; since our fathers, who preceded us, are no mere; 
since our children shall not succeed us, for the nonentity in 
which we must one day be has no consequence; since the sacred 
society of marriage is only a brutal union, from which, by a 
strange and fortuitous concurrence, proceed beings who resemble 
us : r > but who have nothing in common with us but their nonen- 
tity. 

What more shall I add? If all dies with us, domestic annals 
and the train of our ancestors are only a collection of chimeras; 
' since we have no forefathers, and shall have no descendants, 
anxieties for a name and posterity are therefore ridiculous: the 
honours we render to the memory of illustrious men, a childish 
error, since it is absurd to honour what has no existence; the 
sacred respect we pay to the habitations of the dead, a vulgar 
illusion : the ashes of our fathers and friends, a vile dust which 
we should cast to the winds -as belonging to no person; the last 
wishes of the dying, so sacred amongst even the most barbarous 
nations, the last sound of a machine which crumbles in pieces; 
and, to comprise all in a word, if all die with us, the laws are 
then a foolish subjection; kings and rulers phantoms, whom the 
imbecillity of the people has exalted; justice, a usurpation on 
the liberties of men; the law of marriage a vain scruple; mo- 
desty a prejudice; honour and probity chimeras; incests, par- 
ricides, and the blackest villanies, pastimes of nature, and names 
which the policy of legislators has invented. 

Behold, to what the sublime philosophy of the freethinker 
amounts; behold that force of argument, that reason, and that 
wisdom, which they are continually vaunting to us ! Agree to 
their maxims, and the entire universe sinks back to a frightful 
chaos: all is overturned on the earth; all ideas of virtue and 
vice are reversed, and the most inviolable laws of society va- 
nish; the institution of morals perishes; the government of states 
and empires is without direction; all harmony in the body politic 



Serm. VIII.] A FUTURE STATE. 



131 



falls. The human species is only an assemblage of fools, bar- 
barians, voluptuaries, madmen, and villains, who own no law but 
force; no other check than their passions and the terror of au- 
thority; no other bond than -impiety and independence ; and no 
other God than themselves. Behold the world of the free- 
thinker! and if this hideous plan of a republic pleases you, 
constitute, if you can, a society of these monsters. The only 
thing which remains for us to say, is, that you are fully quali- 
fied to occupy a place in it. 

How worthy, then, of man to look forward to an eternal des- 
tiny, to regulate his manners by the law, and to live, as having 
one day to render account of his actions before Him who shall 
weigh us all in the balance ! 

The uncertainty of the believer is then suspicious in its prin- 
ciple, foolish in its proofs, and horrible in its consequences. 
But, after having shown you, that nothing can be more re- 
pugnant to sound reason, than the doubt which he entertains of a 
future state, let us completely confound his pretexts, and prove, 
that nothing is more opposite to the idea of a wise God and to 
the opinion of his own conscience. 

Part H. It is no doubt astonishing, that the freethinker 
should seek, even in the greatness of God, a shelter to his crimes; 
and that, finding nothing within himself to justify the horrors 
of his soul, he can expect to find, in the awful Majesty of the 
Supreme Being, an indulgence which he cannot find even in the 
corruption of his own heart. 

Indeed, says the unbeliever, it is worthy the greatness of God 
to pay attention to what passes among men; to calculate their 
virtues or vices; to study even their thoughts, and their trifling 
and endless desires? Men, worms of the earth, who sink into 
nothing before the majesty of his looks, are they worthy his 
attentive inspection? And is it not degrading a God, whom we 
are taught to believe so great, to give to him an employment 
by which even man would be dishonoured? 

But, before I make you sensible of the whole absurdity of 
this blasphemy, I beg you will observe, that it is the freethinker 
himself who thus degrades the Majesty of God, and brings him 
to a level with man. For, has the Almighty occasion narrowly 
to observe men, in order to know every thought and deed? Are 
cares and attentions necessary for him, to see what passes on the 
earth? Is it not in him that we are, that we live, that we act? 
And can we shun his looks, or can he even avert them from 
our crimes? What folly, then, in the freethinker, to suppose 
that it requires care and observation from the Divinity, if he 
wishes to remark what passes on the earth ! His only employ- 
ment is to know and enjoy himself. 

This reflection admitted; I answer, in the first place, If it be- 
come the greatness of God to leave good and evil without pu- 



132 



THE CERTAINTY OF [Serm. VIII. 



nishment or reward, it is then equally indifferent, whether we be 
just, sincere, friendly, and charitable, or cruel, deceitful, perfid- 
ious, and unnatural; God consequently does not love virtue, mo- 
desty, rectitude, religion, more than debauchery, perjury, im- 
piety, and villany; since the just and the impious, the pure and 
the impure, shall experience the same lot, and an eternal anni- 
hilation equally awaits them all in the grave. 

What do I say? God even seems to declare in favour of the 
impious here against the just. He exalts him like the cedar of 
Lebanon; loads him with riches and honours; gratifies his de- 
sires, and assists lus projects; for the impious are in general the 
prosperous on the earth. On the contrary, he seems to neglect 
the upright man; he humbles, afflicts, and delivers him up to 
the falsity and power of his enemies; for disgrace and affliction 
are the common portion of the good below. What a monster 
of a Supreme Being, if all must finish with man, and if neither 
miseries nor rewards, except those in tins life, be to be expected ! 

Is he, then, the protector of adulteries, profanations, and the 
most shocking crimes: the persecutor of innocence, modesty, 
piety, and all the purest virtues? Are his favours the price of 
guilt, and his punishments the recompence of virtue? What a 
God of darkness, imbecillity? confusion, and iniquity, does the 
freethinker form to himself! 

What, my brethren ! It would become His greatness to leave 
the world he has created, in a general confusion; to see the wick- 
ed almost always prevail over the upright; the innocent crush- 
ed by the usurper; the father, the victim of an ambitious and 
tmnatural son? From the height of his greatness, God would 
amuse himself with these horrible transactions, without any in- 
terest in their commission? Because he is great, he should be 
either weak, unjust, or cruel! Because men are insignificant, 
they should have the privilege of being dissolute without guilt, 
or virtuous without merit? 

O God! if such be the character of thy Supreme Being; if 
it be thee whom we adore, under such shocking ideas, I know 
thee no more, then, as my heavenly Father, my protector, the 
consoler of my sufferings, the support of my weakness, and the 
rewarder of my fidelity ! Thou art then only an indolent and 
capricious tyrant, who sacrificest all men to thy vain pride, and 
hast drawn them from nothing, only to serve as the sport of thy 
leisure or caprice ! 

For, lastly, If there be no future state, what design, worthy 
of his wisdom, could God have proposed in creating man? What, 
in forming them, he had no other view than in forming the 
beast? Man, that being so noble, who is capable of such sublime 
thoughts, such vast desires, and such grand sentiments; sus- 
ceptible of love, truth, and justice: Man, of all creatures 
alone worthy of a great destination, that of knowing and loving 
the Author of his being; that man should be made only for the 
earth, to pass a small portion of days, like the beast, in trifling 



Serm. VIII.] A FUTURE STATE. 



133 



employments, or sensual gratifications ; he should fulfil his pur- 
pose, by acting so risible and so pitiable a part; and afterwards 
should sink back to nonentity, without any other use having been 
made of that vast mind and elevated heart which the Author 
of his being had given him? O God! where would here be thy 
wisdom, to have made so grand a work for the duration only of 
a moment ; to have exhibited men upon the earth, only as the play- 
ful essays of thy power; or to amuse thy leisure by a variety of 
shows ! The Deity of the freethinker is not grand, therefore, 
but because he is more unjust, capricious, and despicable than 
men! Pursue these reflections, and support, if you can, all the 
extravagance of their folly. 

How worthy, then, of God, my brethren, to watch over the 
universe ; to conduct man, whom he has created, by the laws of 
justice, truth, charity, and innocence; to make virtue and rea- 
son the bond of union and the foundation of human society! 
How worthy of God to love in his creatures those virtues which 
render himself amiable; to hate the vices which disfigure in 
them his image; not to confound for ever the just with the im- 
pious; to render happy with himself those souls who have lived 
only for him; and to deliver up to their own misery those who 
believed they had found a happiness independent of him! 

Behold the God of the Christians; behold that wise, just, and 
holy Deity whom we adore; and the advantage we have over 
the freethinker is, that ours is the God of an innocent and pure 
heart; the God whom all creatures manifest to us; whom all 
ages have invoked; whom the sages, even of Paganism, have 
acknowledged; and of whom nature has deeply engraven the 
idea on the very foundation of our being! 

But, since God is so just, ought he to punish, as crimes, incli- 
nations for pleasure born with us; nay, which he alone has 
given us? Last blasphemy of impiety, and last part of this dis- 
course: I shall abridge it, and conclude 

But, in the first place, Be whom you may, who hold this ab- 
surd language, if you pretend to justify all your actions by the 
inclinations which induce you to them; if whatever we wish 
become legitimate; if our desires ought to be the only regula- 
tion of our duties; on that principle, you have only to regard, 
with an envious eye, the fortune of your brother, to acquire a 
right to despoil him of it; his wife, with a corrupted heart, to 
be authorised to violate the sanctity of the nuptial bed, in oppo*- 
sition to the most sacred rights of society and nature. You 
have only to suspect, or dislike an opponent, to become entitled 
to destroy him; to bear, with impatience, the authority of a fa- 
ther, or the severity of a master, to imbrue your hands in their 
blood: In a word, you have only to bear within you the im- 
pressions of every vice, to be permitted the gratification of all; 
and, as each finds the fatal seeds in himself, none would be ex- 



134 



THE CERTAINTY OF [Serm. VIIL 



empted from this horrible privilege. It is necessary, therefore, 
that man conduct himself by other laws than his inclinations, 
and another rule than his desires. 

Even the Pagan sages acknowledged the necessity of a philo- 
sophy, that is to say, of a light superior to the senses, which re- 
gulated their practice, and made reason a check to the human 
passions. 

Nature alone led them to this truth, and taught them that 
blind instinct ought not to be the sole guide of the actions of 
men: This instinct, therefore, either is not the original insti- 
tution of nature, or it must be a corruption of it; since all 
the laws ever framed on the earth have avowedly been made 
to restrain it; that all those who, in every age, have borne 
the character of wise and virtuous, have rejected its impres- 
sions; that, amongst all nations, those infamous individuals 
who yielded themselves up, without reserve or shame, to brutal 
sensuality, have been always considered as monsters, and the 
disgrace of humanity; and, the maxim once established, that 
our inclinations and desires cannot be considered as crimes, so- 
ciety can no longer exist; men must separate to be in safety, 
must bury themselves in the forests, and live solitary like the 
beasts. 

Besides, let us render justice to men, or rather to the Author 
who has formed us. If we find within us inclinations to vice 
and voluptuousness, do we not also find sentiments of virtue, 
modesty, and innocence? If the law of the members drag us 
towards the pleasures of the senses, do we not also bear, writ- 
ten in our hearts, another law, which recals us to chastity and 
temperance? Now, betwixt these two tendencies, why does the 
freethinker decide that the inclination which impels us towards 
the senses is most conformable to the nature of man? Is it from 
being the most violent? But its violence alone is a proof of its 
disorder; and whatever comes from nature ought to be more 
moderate. Is it from being the strongest? But there are just 
and believing souls in whom it is always subject to reason. Is 
it from being more agreeable? But a sure proof that this plea- 
sure is not made to render man happy, is, that disgust imme- 
diately follows it; and likewise that to the good virtue has a 
thousand times more charms than vice. Lastly, Is it from be- 
ing more worthy of man? You dare not say so, since it is 
through it that he confounds himself with the beast. Why, 
then, do you decide in favour of the senses, against reason, and 
insist, that it is more conformable to man to live like the beast 
than to be a reasonable being? 

Lastly, were all men corrupted, and, like the animals, not 
gifted with reason; did they blindly yield themselves up to their 
brutal instinct, and to the empire of the senses and passions, — 
you, then, perhaps, might have reason to say, that these are in- 
clinations inseparable from nature, and, in example, find a sort 



Serm. VIII.] A FUTURE STATE. 



135 



of excuse for your excesses. But look around you: Do you no 
longer find any upright characters on the earth? There is no 
question here of those vain discourses you so frequently hold a- 
gainst piety, and of which you feel yourselves the injustice: 
Speak candidly, and render glory to the truth. Are there no 
longer chaste, faithful, and righteous souls, who live in the fear 
of the Lord, and in the observance of his holy law? 

Whence comes it, then, that you have not the same empire 
over your passions enjoyed by these just men? Have they not 
inherited from nature the same inclinations? Do the objects of 
the passions not awaken in their hearts the same sensations as in 
yours? Do they not bear within them the sources of the same 
troubles? What have the just superior to you but that com-? 
mand over themselves, and fidelity, of which you are destitute? 

O man ! Thou imputest to God a weakness which is the 
work of thine own disorders ! Thou accusest the Author of na- 
ture of the irregularities of thy will; it is not enough to offend 
him; thou wishest to make him responsible for thy deeds, and 
pretendest that the fruit of thy crimes becomes the title of thine 
innocence] With what chimeras is a corrupted heart not capa- 
ble of feeding its delusion, in order to justify to itself the shame 
and infamy of its vices ! 

God is-then just, my brethren, when he punisheth the trans- 
gressions of his law. And let not the freethinker here say to 
himself that the recompense of the just shall then be resurrec- 
tion to eternal life, and the punishment of the sinner the ever- 
lasting annihilation of his soul; for behold the last resource of 
impiety. 

But what punishment would it be to the freethinker to exist 
no more? He wishes that annihilation; he looks forward to it 
as his sweetest hope: Amidst his pleasures he lives tranquil 
only in that expectation. What ! The just God would punish 
a sinner by according him a destiny to the summit of his wishes. 
Ah ! is it not thus that God punisheth. For what would the 
freethinker find so shocking in a return to nonentity? Would 
it be in the deprivation of his God? But he loves him not; he 
knows him not; he desires no communication with him; for 
his only God is himself. Would it be to exist no more? But 
what could be more desirable to a monster, who knows that, 
beyond the term of his crimes, he cannot live but in sufferance, 
and in the expiation of the horrors of an infamous life? Would 
it be by having for ever lost the worldly pleasures he enjoyed, 
and the different objects of his passions? But, when he exists 
no more, the love of these must equally be extinguished. A 
more desirable fate cannot therefore be pointed out to the free- 
thinker. It indeed would be the happy conclusion of all his 
excesses, horrors, and blasphemies. 

No, my brethren ! The hopes of the freethinker, but not his 
crimes, shall perish; his torments shall be as eternal as his de- 



136 



THE CERTAINTY, &c. [Serm. VIIL 



baucheries would have been, had lie been master of his own des- 
tiny. He would willingly have eternized himself on the earth, 
in the practice of every sensual vice. Death has bounded his 
crimes, but has not limited his criminal desires. The just and 
upright J udge, who fathoms the heart, will therefore proportion 
the punishment to the guilt. 

What are we to conclude from this discourse? That the free- 
thinker is to be pitied for grounding the only consolation of his 
future destiny on the uncertainty of the truths of the gospel : 
That he is to be pitied because his only tranquility must be in 
living without faith, worship, confidence, or God; because the 
only hope that he can indulge, is, that the gospel is a fable; the 
belief of all ages a childish credulity; the universal opinion of 
men a popular error; the first principles of nature and reason 
prejudices of education; the blood of so many martyrs, whom 
the hopes of a future state supported under all their sufferings 
and tortures, a mere tale concerted to deceive mankind; the 
conversion of the world a human enterprise; and the accom- 
plishment of the promises a mere stroke of chance: In a word, 
that every thing, the best established, and the most consistent 
with truth and reason in the world, must all be false, to accom- 
plish the only happiness he can promise himself, and to save 
him from eternal misery. 

O man ! I will point out to thee a much surer way to ren- 
der thyself tranquil, and to enjoy the sweets of internal peace. 
Dread that futurity thou forcest thyself to disbelieve. Question 
us no more what they do in that other world of which we tell 
thee, but ask thyself, without ceasing, what thou art doing in 
this? Quiet thy conscience by the innocency of thy life, and 
not by the impiety of thy unbelief; give repose to thy heart, by 
calling upon God, and not by doubting that he pays attention 
to thee: The peace of the unbeliver is despair. Seek, then, 
thy happiness, not by freeing thyself from the yoke of faith, but 
by tasting how sweet and agreeable it is. Follow the maxims 
it prescribes to thee, and thy reason will no longer refuse sub- 
mission to the mysteries it commands thee to believe. A fu- 
ture state will cease to appear incredible to thee from the mo- 
ment thou ceasest to live like those who centre all their happi- 
ness in the fleeting moments of this life. Then, far from dread- 
ing a futurity, thy wishes will anticipate it. Thou wilt sigh for 
the arrival of that happy day, when the Son of man, the Father 
of all future ages, shall come to punish the unbelieving, and to 
conduct thee to his kingdom, along with those who have lived 
on the earth in the expectation and hope of a blessed immor- 
tality. 

That you, my brethren, may be partakers of this eternal feli- 
city, is my fervent prayer. Amen, 



SerM. IX.] 



ON DEATH. 



137 



SERMON IX. 
ON DEATH. 
Luke vii. 12. 

Now, when he came nigh to the gate of the city, behold, there was a dead 
man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. 

Was death ever accompanied with more affecting circum- 
stances? It is an only son, sole successor to the name, titles, 
and fortune of his ancestors, whom death snatches from an af- 
flicted mother and widow; he is ravished from her in the flower 
of age, and almost at his entry into life: at a period when, hap- 
pily past the dangers of infancy? and attained to that first degree 
of strength and reason which commences man, he seemed least 
exposed to the shafts of death, and at last allowed maternal ten- 
derness to breathe from the fears which accompany the uncer- 
tain progress of education. The citizens run in crowds, to min- 
gle their tears with those of the disconsolate mother; they assi- 
duously seek to lessen her grief, by the consolation of those 
vague and common-place discourses to which profound sorrow 
little attends; with her they surround the mournful bier, and 
they deck the obsequies with their mourning and presence; the 
train of this funeral pomp to them is a show; but is it an in- 
struction? They are struck and affected, but are they from it 
less attached to life? And will not the remembrance of this 
death perish in their minds, with the noise and decorations of 
the funeral? 

To similar examples, we every day bring the same disposi- 
tions. The feelings which an unexpected death awakens in our 
hearts are the feelings of a day, as though death itself ought to 
be the concern of a day. We exhaust ourselves in vain reflec- 
tions on the inconstancy of human things; but, the object which 
struck us once out of sight, the heart, become tranquil, finds it- 
self the same. Our projects, our cares, our attachments to the 
world, are not less lively than if we were labouring for eternal 
ages; and, at our departure from a melancholy spectacle, where 
we have sometimes seen birth, youth, titles, and fame, wither 
in a moment, and for ever buried in the grave, we return to the 
world more occupied with, and more eager than ever after all 
those vain objects of which we so lately had seen with our eyes, 
and almost felt with our hands, the insignificancy and mean- 
ness. 



138 



ON DEATH. 



[Serm. IX. 



Let us at present examine the reasons of so deplorable a mis- 
take. Whence comes it that men reflect so little upon death, 
and that the thoughts of it make such transitory impressions? 
It is this: The uncertainty of death amuses us, and removes 
from our mind its remembrance: The certainty of death ap- 
pals, and forces us to turn our eyes from the gloomy picture: 
The uncertainty of it lulls and encourages us; whatever is aw- 
ful and certain, with regard to it, makes us dread the thoughts 
of it. Now, I wish at present to combat the dangerous securi- 
ty of the first and the improper dread of the other. Death is 
uncertain; you are therefore imprudent not to be occupied with 
the thoughts of it, but to allow it to surprise you: Death is 
certain; you then are foolish to dread the thoughts of it, and it 
ought never to be out of your sight: Think upon death, be- 
cause you know not the hour it will arrive: Think upon death, 
because it must arrive. This is the subject of the present dis- 
course. * 

Part I. — The first step which man makes in life, is like- 
wise the first towards the grave: From the moment his eyes 
open to the light, the sentence of death is pronounced against 
him; and, as though it were a crime to live, it is sufficient that 
he lives to make him deserving of death. That was not our 
first destiny: The Author of our being had at first animated 
our clay with a breath of immortality: He had placed in us a 
seed of life, which the revolution of neither years nor time could 
have weakened or distinguished: His work was so perfect, that 
it might have defied the duration of ages, while nothing exter- 
nal could have dissolved or even injured its harmony. Sin a- 
lone withered this divine seed, overturned this blessed order, 
and armed all created beings against man: And Adam became 
mortal from the moment he became a sinner: " By sin," said 
the apostle, " did death enter into the world." 

From our birth, therefore, we all bear it within us. It appears, 
that, in our mother's womb, we have sucked in a slow poison, 
with which we come into the world; which makes us languish 
on the earth, some a longer others a more limited period, but 
which always terminates in death: We die every day; every 
moment deprives* us of a portion of life, and advances us a step 
towards the grave: The body pines, health decays, and every 
thing which surrounds assists to destroy us; food corrupts, me- 
dicines weaken us; the spiritual fire, which internally animates, 
consumes us; and our whole life is only a long and painful 
sickness. Now, in this situation, what image ought to be so 
familiar to man as death? A criminal condemned to die, which- 
ever way he casts his eyes, what can he see but this melancholy 
object? And does the longer or shorter period we have to live 
make a sufficient difference to entitle us to think ourselves im- 
mortal on this earth. 

It is true, that the measure of our lots is not alike: Some, in 



Serm. IX-] ON DEATH. 



139 



peace, see their days grow upon them to the most advanced age, 
and, inheritors, of the blessings of the primeval age, expire full 
of years in the midst of a numerous posterity; others, arrested 
in the middle of their course, see like king Hezekiah, the gates 
of the grave open for them while yet in their prime; and, like 
him, " seek in vain for the residue of their years:" There are 
some who only show themselves as it were on the earth; who 
finish their course with the day, and who, like the flowers of 
the field, leave scarcely an interval betwixt the instant which 
views them in their bloom and that which sees them withered 
and cut off. The fatal moment marked for each is a secret 
written in the book of life, which the Lamb of God alone has 
a right to open. We all live, then, uncertain of the duration 
of our life; and this uncertainty, of itself so fit to render us 
watchful of our last hour, even lulls our vigilance. We never 
think on death, because we know not exactly in what age of life 
to place it: We even regard not old age as the term, at least 
sure and inevitable: The doubt of ever reaching that period, 
which surely ought to fix and limit our hopes to this side of de- 
crepitude, serves only to stretch them beyond it. Unable to 
settle itself on any thing certain, our dread becomes a vague and 
confused feeling, which fixes on nothing ; in so much that the 
uncertainty, which ought only to dwell on the length or brevity 
of it, renders us tranquil on our existence itself. 

Now I say, in the first place, that of all dispositions this is 
the rashest and most imprudent; I appeal to yourselves for this 
truth. Is an evil which may take place every day to be more 
disregarded than another which threatens you only at the expi- 
ration of a number of years? What ! because your soul may 
every moment be recalled, you would tranquilly live as though 
you were never to lose it? Because the danger is always present, 
circumspection becomes less necessary? But in what other situa- 
tion or circumstance of life, except that of our eternal salvation, 
does uncertainty become an excuse for security and neglect? 
Does the conduct of that servant in the gospel who, under pre- 
tence that his master delayed to return, and that he knew not 
the hour when he should arrive, applied his property to his own 
purposes, as if he never were to render account of it appear to 
you a prudent discharge of his duty? What other motives has 
Jesus Christ made use of to exhort us to incessant watching? 
and what in religion is more proper to awake our vigilance 
than the uncertainty of this last day? 

Ah ! my brethren, were the hour unalterably marked for each 
of us; were the kingdom of God, like the stars, to come at a 
known and fixed revolution; at our birth, were our portions 
written on our foreheads; the number of our years, and the fa- 
tal day which shall terminate them; that fixed and certain ob- 
ject, however distant, would incessantly employ our thoughts, 
would agitate and deprive us of every tranquil moment; we 



140 



ON DEATH. 



[Serm. IX. 



would always regard the interval before us as too short; that 
object, in spite of us, always present to our mind, would disgust 
us with every thing; would render every pleasure insipid, for- 
tune indifferent, and the whole world tiresome and a burden: 
That terrible moment, which we would no more lose sight of, 
would repress our passions, extinguish our animosities, disarm 
revenge, calm the revolts of the flesh, and mingle itself in all 
our schemes; and our life, thus limited to a certain number of 
days, fixed and known, would be only a preparation for that 
last moment. Are we in our senses, my brethren? Death seen 
at a distance, at a sure and fixed point, would fill us with dread, 
detach us from the world and ourselves, call us to God, and in- 
cessantly occupy our thoughts; and this same death, uncertain, 
which may happen every day, every instant; this same death, 
which must surprise us when we least expect it, which is per- 
haps at the gate, engages not our attention and leaves us tran- 
quil: What do I say? leaves us all our passions, our criminal 
attachments, our ardour for the world, pleasures, and fortune; 
and, because it is not certain that we shall die to-day, we live 
as if we were to live for ever. 

Observe, my brethren, that this uncertainty is in affect ac- 
companied with all the circumstances most capable of alarm- 
ing, or at least of engaging the attention of a prudent man, who 
makes any use of his reason. In the first place, the surprise of 
that last day you have to dread, is not one of those rare and sin- 
gular accidents which befal only some unfortunate wretches, 
and which it is more prudent to distinguish than to forsee. In or- 
der to be surprised by death, the question at present is not that 
the thunder should fall upon you* heads, that you should be 
buried under the ruins of your palaces, that you should be 
swallowed up by the waves, nor many other accidents, whose 
singularity renders them more terrible, though less dreaded; 
it is a common evil; not a day passes, without furnishing some 
examples; almost all men are surprised by death; all see it 
approach, while they believe it yet at a distance; all say to 
themselves, like the foolish man in the gospel, " Why should 
" I be afraid? I have many years yet to come." In this man- 
ner have you seen depart, your relations, friends, and almost 
all those whose death you have witnessed; every instance sur- 
prised you; you expected it not so soon; and you endeavoured 
to account for it by human reasons; such as the imprudence 
of the patient, or the want of proper advice and medicines: 
but the only and true- reason is, that the hour of the Lord 
always takes us by surprise. 

The earth is like a vast field of battle, where we are every 
day engaged with the enemy; you have happily escaped to-day; 
but you have witnessed the fall of many, who, like you, ex- 
pected to survive; to-morrow, you again must enter the lists; 
and who has told you that fortune, so capricious with regard to 



Serm. IX.] 



ON DEATH. 



141 



others, to you alone will continue favourable? And since you 
at last must perish there, are you prudent in building a fixed 
and permanent habitation, on the very spot, perhaps, intended 
for your tomb? Place yourselves in any possible situation, 
there is not a moment but may be your last, and has actually 
been so to some of your brethren; no brilliant action, but may 
terminate in the eternal shades of the grave; and Herod is 
struck in the midst of the servile and foolish applauses of his 
people: No day set apart for the solemn display of wordly 
magnificence, but may conclude with your funeral pomp; and 
Jezebel was precipitated, the very day she had chosen to show 
herself in her greatest pride and ostentation, from the windows 
of her palace: No festival but may be the feast of death; and 
Belshazzer expired in the midst of a sumptuous banquet: No 
repose but may conduct you to an everlasting sleep ; and 
Holofernes, in the heart of his army, and conqueror of so many 
kingdoms and provinces, fell under the stroke of a simple 
Jewish woman : No disease, but may be the fatal term of your 
course; and every day you see the slightest complaints deceive 
the opinions of the most skilful and the expectations of the 
patient, and almost in an instant take the turn of death : In a 
word, figure yourselves in any possible stage or station of life, 
and with difficulty can you number those who have been sur- 
prised in a similiar situation; and what right have you to ex- 
pect, that you alone shall be exempted from a lot common to 
all? You allow, you confess this; but these confessions are 
merely words of course, and are never followed by a single pre* 
caution to secure you from the danger. 

2dly. Did this uncertainty turn only on the hour, the place, 
or the manner of your death, it would appear less shocking; 
for, after all, says a holy father, what matters it to a Christian, 
whether he shall expire in the midst of his connexions or in 
the country of strangers; in the bed of sorrow or the abyss 
of the waves; provided he dies in piety and righteousness! 
But what renders this terrible, is, the uncertainty whether 
you shall die in the Lord or in sin: that you shall know not 
what shall be your lot in that other region, where conditions 
change no more; into whose hands, at its departure from the 
body, your soul trembling, a stranger and alone shall fall; 
whether it shall be surrounded with light and carried to the 
foot of the throne on the wings of blessed and happy spirits, or 
enveloped in darkness, and cast headlong into the gulf: You 
hang betwixt these two eternities; you know not to which you 
shall be attached: death alone will disclose the secret; and in 
this uncertainty you remain tranquil, and indolently wait its 
approach, as though it were a matter of no importance to you, 
nor to determine your eternal happiness or misery? Ah! my 
brethren, were it even true that all ends with us, the impious 
man would still be foolish in saying. " Let us think not on 



142 ON DEATH. [Serm. IX. 



death; let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die:" The 
more he found life agreeable, the more reason would he have 
to be afraid of death, which to him would, however, be only a 
cessation of existence. But we, to whom faith opens prospects 
of punishment or eternal rewards beyond the grave; we who 
must reach the gates of death, still uncertain of this dreadful 
alternative, is there not a folly, what do I say? a madness, 
(not to be sure in professing the sentiments of the impious, 
" Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,)" in living as 
though we thought like him ! Is it possible we can remain a 
single instant unoccupied with that decisive moment, and with- 
out allaying, by the precautions of faith, that trouble and dread 
into which this uncertainty must cast a soul who has not yet 
renounced his eternal hopes? 

3dly. In all other uncertainties, the number of those who 
share the same danger may inspire us with confidence; or 
resources, with which we flatter ourselves, may leave us more 
tranquil; or, even at the worst, the disappointment becomes a 
lesson, which teaches us, to our cost, to be more guarded in fu- 
ture: But, in the dreadful uncertainty in question, the number 
of those who run the same risk can diminish nothing from our 
danger; all the resources with which we may flatter ourselves 
on the bed of death, are, in general, merely illusive; and reli- 
gion itself, which furnishes them, dare ground but small hopes 
on them: In a word, the mistake is ii'remediable; we die only 
once, and our past folly can no more serve as a lesson to guard 
us from future error. Our misfortunes indeed open our eyes; 
but these new lights, which dissipate our blindness, become 
useless, by the immutability of our state, and are rather a cruel 
knowledge of our misery, which prepares to tear us with eternal 
remorse, and to occasion the most grevious portion of our pun- 
ishment, than wise reflections which may lead us to repentance. 

Upon what, then, can you justify this profound and incom- 
prehensible neglect of your last day, in which you live? On 
youth, which may seem to promise you many years yet to come? 

Youth! But the son of the widow of Nain was young: 
Does death respect ages or rank? Youth ! But that is exactly 
what makes me tremble for you; licentious manners, pleasures 
to excess, extravagant passions, ambitious desires, the dangers 
of war, thirst for renown, and the sallies of revenge; is it not 
during the pursuit, or gratification of some one of these pas- 
sions, that the majority of men finish their career? Adonias, 
but for his debaucheries, might have lived to a good old age; 
Absalom, but for his ambition; the king of Sachem's son, but 
for his love of Dinah; Jonathan, had glory not dug a grave for 
him in the mountains of Gilboa. Youth ! Alas ! it is the sea- 
son of dangers, and the rock upon which life generally splits. 

Once more, then, Upon what do you found your hopes? On 
the strength of your constitution? But what is the best-estab- 



Serm. IX.] 



ON DEATH. 



143 



lished health? A spark which a breath shall extinguish: A sin- 
gle day's sickness is sufficient to lay low the most robust. I ex- 
amine not after this, whether you do not even flatter yourselves 
on this point: If a body, exhausted by the irregularities of youth, 
do not announce to your own minds the sentence of death; if 
habitual infirmities do not lay open before you the gates of the 
grave; if disagreeable indications do not menace you with some 
sudden accident. I wish you to lengthen out your days even 
beyond your hopes. Alas ! my brethren, can any period appear 
long which must at last come to an end? Look back, and see 
where now are your youthful years? What trace of solid joy 
do they leave in your remembrance? Not more that a vision of 
the night; you dream that you have lived, and behold all that 
is left to you of it: All that interval, elapsed from your birth to 
the present day, is like a rapid flash, whose passage the eye, far 
from dwelling on, can with difficulty see: Had you begun to 
live even with the world itself, the past would now appear to 
you neither longer nor more real: all the ages elapsed down to 
the present day you would look upon as fugitive instants; all 
the nations which have appeared and disappeared on the earth; 
all the revolutions of empires and kingdoms; all those grand 
events which embellish our histories, to you would be only the 
different scenes of a show which you had seen concluded in a 
day. Recollect the victories, the captured cities, the glorious 
treaties, the magnificence, the splendid events of the first years 
of this reign; most of you have not only witnessed, but have 
shared in their danger and glory; our annals will convey them 
down to our latest posterity; but to you they are already but a 
dream, but a momentary flash, which is extinguished, and which 
every day effaces more and more from your remembrance. What, 
then, is this small portion you have still to accomplish? Can 
you believe that the days to come have more reality than those 
already past? Years appear long while yet at a distance; ar- 
rived, they vanish, they slip from us in an instant; and scarcely 
shall we have looked around us, when, as if by enchantment, we 
shall find ourselves at the fatal term, which still appeared so dis- 
tant that we rashly concluded it would never arrive. View 
the world, such as you have seen it in your youthful days, 
and such as you now see it: New personages have mounted 
the stage; the grand parts are filled by new actors; there are 
new events, new intrigues, new passions, new heroes in virtue 
as well as in vice, which engage the praises, derisions, and cen- 
sures of the public; a new world, without your having perceived 
it, has insensibly risen on the wrecks of the first; every thing 
passes with and like you; a velocity, which nothing can stop, 
drags all into the gulf of eternity : Yesterday our ancestors clear- 
ed the way for us; and to-morrow we shall do the same for those 
who are to follow. Ages succeed each other; the appearance of the 
world incessantly changes; the dead and the living continually 
replace and succeed each other. Nothing stands still; all chan- 



144 



ON DEATH. 

i 



[Serm. IX. 



ges, all wastes away, all has an end: God alone remaineth al- 
ways the same: The torment of ages, which sweeps away all men, 
flows before his eyes ; and, with indignation, he sees weak mor- 
tals, carried down by that rapid course, insult him while passing; 
wish, of that transitory instant, to constitute all their happiness; 
and, at their departure from it, fall into the hands of his ven- 
geance and wrath. Where, says the apostle, amongst us, are 
now the wise? And a man, were he even capable of governing 
the world, can he merit that name from the moment that he for- 
gets what he is and what he must be? 

Nevertheless, my brethren, what impression on us does the in- 
stability of every thing worldly make? The death of our rela- 
tions, friends, competitors, and masters? We never think that 
we are immediately to follow them! we think only of decking 
ourselves out in their spoils; we think not on the little time they 
had enjoyed them, but only on the pleasure they must have had 
in their possession : We hasten to profit ourselves from the wreck 
of each other: We are like those foolish soldiers, who, in the 
heat of battle, when their companions are every moment falling 
around them, eagerly load themselves with their clothes; and 
scarcely are they put on, when a mortal blow at once deprives 
them of their absurd decorations and life. In this manner the 
son decks himself with the spoils of the father; closes his eyes; 
succeeds to his rank, fortune, and dignities ; conducts the pomp 
of his funeral, and leaves it more occupied with, more affected 
by the new titles with which he is now invested, than instruct- 
ed by the last advices of a dying parent; than afflicted for his 
loss, or even undeceived with regard to the things of the earth, 
by a sight which places before his eyes their insignificancy, and 
announces to him the same destiny soon. The death of our 
companions is not a more useful lesson to us: Such a person 
leaves vacant an office which we hasten to obtain; another pro- 
motes us a step in the service; claims expire with this one, which 
might have greatly embarrassed us; that one now leaves us the 
undisputed favourite of our sovereign; another brings us a step 
nearer to a certain dignity, and opens the road to a rank which 
his death alone could render attainable; and, on these occasions, 
our spirits are invigorated: we adopt new measures, and form 
new projects; and, far from our eyes being opened, by the ex- 
amples of those whom we see disappear, their issue, even from 
their ashes, fatal sparks, whi'ch inflame all our desires and at- 
tachments to the world: and death, that gloomy picture of our 
misery, reanimates more passions among men than even all 
the illusions of life. What, then, can detach us from this wret- 
ched world, since death itself seems only to knit more strongly 
the bonds, and strengthen us in the errors which bind us to it. 

Here, my brethren, I require nothing from you but reason. 
What are the natural consequences which good sense alone 
ought to draw from the uncertainty of death? 



Bnmau IX. j 



ON DEATH. 



145 



1st. The hour of death is uncertain: Every year, every day, 
every moment, may be the last of our life: it is absurd, then, 
by attaching* ourselves to what must pass away in an instant, to 
sacrifice the only riches which are eternal; every thing you do 
for the earth ought therefore to appear as lost, since you have 
no interest there; you can depend on nothing there, and can 
carry nothing from it, but what you shall have done for heaven; 
The kingdoms of the earth, and all their glory, ought not then 
for a moment to balance the interests of your eternal welfare, 
since the greatest fortune cannot assure you of a day more than 
the most humble; and, since the only consequence which can 
accrue from it is a more deep and bitter sorrow on the bed of 
death, when you shall be obliged for ever to part from them, 
every care, every movement, every desire, ought therefore to 
centre in establishing for yourselves a permanent and un- 
changeable fortune, an eternal happiness, which fadeth not 
away. 

2dly. The hour of your death is uncertain : You ought then 
to expect it every day; never to permit yourselves an action, 
in which you would wish not to be surprised; to consider all 
your proceedings as those of a dying man, who every moment 
expects his soul to be recalled; to act, in every thing, as though 
you were that instant to render account of your conduct; and, 
since you cannot answer for the time which is to come, in such 
a manner to regulate the present that you may have no occa- 
sion for the future to repair its errors. 

Lastly. The hour of your death is uncertain: Delay not, 
then, your repentance: time presses; hasten, then, your con- 
version to the Lord; you cannot assure yourselves of a day, 
and you defer it to a distant and uncertain period to come. 
Were you unfortunately to swallow a mortal poison, would you 
put off to another day the trial of the only antidote which 
might save your life? Would the agent of death, which you 
carried in your bowels, allow of delays and neglect? Such is 
your state. If you be wise, have instant recourse to your pre- 
cautions: You carry death in your soul, since in it you carry 
sin; hasten to apply the remedy, since every moment is pre- 
cious to him who cannot depend on one; the poisonous bever- 
age which infects your soul cannot long be trifled with; the 
goodness of God still holds out to you a cure; hasten, once 
more I say, to secure it, while it is not yet too late. Should 
intreaties be necessary to determine your compliance, ought 
not the prospect of relief to be sufficient? Is it necessary to 
exhort an unfortunate wretch, just sinking in the waves, to 
exert his endeavours to save himself? Ought you, in this mat- 
ter, to have occasion for our ministry? Your last hour ap- 
proaches; you soon shall have to appear before the tribunal of 
God. You may usefully employ the moment which yet re- 

K 



146 



ON DEATH. 



[Serm. IX. 



mains to you; almost all those, whose departure from this 
world you are daily witnessing, allow it to slip from them, and 
die without having reaped any advantage from it : You imitate 
their neglect; the same surprise awaits you, and, like them, 
you will be cut off before the work of reformation has com- 
menced. They had been warned of it, and in the same man- 
ner we warn you; their misery touches you not; and the un- 
fortunate lot which awaits you, will not more sensibly affect 
those to whom we shall one day announce it; it is a succession 
of blindness, which passes from father to son, and is perpetu- 
ated on the earth: We all wish to live better, and we all die be- 
fore we have begun to reform. 

Such, my brethren, are the prudent and natural reflections 
which the uncertainty of our last hour should lead us to make. 
But if, on account of its uncertainty, you are imprudent in pay- 
ing no more attention to it, than as if it were never to arrive, 
the fearful portion attending its certainty still less excuses your 
folly, in striving to remove that melancholy image from your 
mind, under the pretence of its only tending to empoison every 
comfort, and to destroy the tranquillity of life. This is what I 
have still to lay before you. 

Part II. — Man loves not to dwell upon his nothingness and 
meanness; whatever recalls to him his origin, puts him in mind 
also of his end, wounds his pride, interests his self-love, attacks 
the foundation of all his passions, and gives birth to gloomy and 
disagreeable thoughts. To die, to disappear from the earth, to 
enter the dark abyss of eternity, to become a carcase, the food 
of worms, the horror of men, the hideous inmate of a tomb; 
that sight alone revolts every sense, distracts reason, blackens 
imagination, and empoisons every comfort in life; we dare not 
fix our looks on so hideous an image; we reject that thought, as 
the most gloomy and bitter of all : We dread, we fly from every 
thing which may force its remembrance on our mind, as though 
it would hasten the approach of the fatal horn*. Under a pre- 
tence of tenderness, we love not to hear mention of our depart- 
ed friends; care is taken to remove our attention from the places 
in which they have dwelt, and from every thing which, along 
with their idea, at same time awakens that of death which has 
deprived us of them. We dread all melancholy recitals; in that 
respect we carry our terrors even to the most childish supersti- 
tion; in every trifle x>ur fancy sees fatal prognostications of 
death; in the wanderings of a dream, in the nightly sounds of 
a bird, in the casual number of a company, and in many other 
circumstances still more ridiculous; everywhere we imagine it 
before us; and, for that very reason, we endeavour to expel it 
from our thoughts. 

Now, my brethren, these excessive terrors were pardonable 
in Pagans, to whom death was the greatest misfortune, seeing 



Serm. IX.] 



ON DEATH, 



H7 



they had no expectation beyond the grave; and that, living with- 
out hope, they died without consolation. But that death should 
be so terrible to Christians is a matter of astonishment; and 
that the dread of that image should even serve as a pretext to 
remove its idea from their minds, is still more so. 

For, in the first place, I grant that you have reason to dread that 
last hour; but, as it is certain, I cannot conceive why the terrors 
of it should prevent your mind from dwelling upon, and endea- 
vouring to anticipate its evils; on the contrary, it seems to me, 
that in proportion as the danger is great, to which you are ex- 
posed, you ought more constantly to keep it in view, and to use 
every precaution that it may not take you unawares. What ! 
* the more the danger alarms you, the more it should render you 
indolent and careless ! The excessive and improper terrors of 
your imagination should cure you, even of that prudent dread 
which operates your salvation; and, because you dread too much, 
you should abandon every thought of it ! But, where is the man 
whom a too lively sense of danger renders calm and intrepid? 
Were it necessary to march through a narrow and steep defile, 
surrounded on all sides by precipices, would you order your 
eyes to be bound, that you might not see your danger, and lest 
the depth of the gulf below should turn your head? Ah! my 
dear hearer, you see the grave open before you, and that spec- 
tacle alarms you; but, in place of taking all the precautions 
offered to you by religion, to prevent you falling headlong into 
the gulf, you cover your eyes that you may not see it; you fly 
to dissipation to chace its idea from your mind; and, like those 
unfortunate victims of Paganism, you run to the stake, your 
eyes covered, crowned with flowers, and surrounded by dancing 
and songs of joy, that you may not have leisure to reflect on the 
fatal term to which this pomp conducts, and lest you should 
see the altar, that is to say, the bed of death, where you are im- 
mediately to be sacrificed. 

Besides, by repelling that thought, could you likewise repel 
death, your terrors would then at least have an excuse. But 
think, or think not on it, death always advances; every effort 
you make to exclude its remembrance brings you nearer to it; 
and at the appointed hour it will come. What, then, do you 
gain by turning your mind from that thought? Do you 
lessen the danger? On the contrary, you augment it, and 
render a surprisal inevitable. By averting your eyes, do you 
soften the horror of that spectacle? Alas! you only multiply 
its terrors. Were you to familiarize yourselves more with 
the thoughts of death, your mind, weak and timid, would in- 
sensibly accustom itself to it: «You would gradually acquire 
courage to view it without anguish, or at least with resignation 
on the bed of death; it would no longer be an unusual and 
strange sight. A long anticipated danger astonishes not: Death 
is only formidable the first time that the imagination dwells 



148 



OX DEATH. 



[Serm. IX. 



upon it; and it is only when not expected, and no provision 
made against it, that it is to be dreaded. 

But, when that thought should even disquiet, and fill you 
with impressions of dread and sorrow, where would be the dis- 
appointment? Are you, upon the earth, to live onlv in an in- 
dolent ease, and solely engrossed by agreeable and smiling ob- 
jects? We should lose our reason, say you, were we to devote 
our attention to this dismal spectacle, without the relaxation of 
pleasures. We should lose our reason ! But so many faithful 
souls, who, in all then- actions, mingle that thought; who make 
the remembrance of that last hour the check to curb their pas- 
sions, and the most powerful inducement to fidelity; so many 
illustrious penitents, who have buried themselves alive in their 
tombs, that they might never lose sight of that object: the holy 
who every day suffered death, like the Apostle, that they might 
live for ever, have they, in consequence of it, lost their reason? 
You should lose your reason ! That is to say, you would regard 
the world as an exilement, pleasures as an intoxication, sin as 
the greatest of evils: places, honours, favour, and fortune, as 
dreams; and salvation as the grand and only object worthy of 
attention: Is that to lose our reason? Blessed folly! And 
would that you, from this moment, were amongst the num- 
ber of these foolish sages. You would lose your reason ! Yes, 
that false, worldly, proud, carnal, and mistaken reason, which 
seduces you; that corrupted reason, which obscures faith, au- 
thorises the passions, makes us prefer the present moment to 
eternity; takes the shadow for the substance, and leads all men 
astray: Yes, that deplorable reason, that vain philosophy, 
which looks upon as a weakness the dread of a future state, 
and, because it dreads it too much, seems, in appearance, or en- 
deavours to force itself not to believe it at all. But that pru- 
dent, enlightened, moderate, and Christian reason, that wisdom 
of the serpent, so recommended in the gospel, it is in that re- 
membrance that you would find it: That wisdom, says the 
Holy Spirit, preferable to all the treasures and honours of the 
earth; that wisdom so honourable to man, and which exalts 
him so much above himself; that wisdom which has formed so 
many Christian heroes; it is the image always present of your 
last hour, which will embellish your soul with it. But that 
thought, you add, should we take it into our head to enter deep- 
ly into, and to dwell continually upon it, would be fit to make 
us renounce all, and to form the most violent and overstrained 
resolutions; that is to say, would detach you from the world, 
your vices, passions, the infamy of your excesses, and make you 
lead a chaste, regular, and Christian life, alone worthy of rea- 
son: These are what the world calls violent and overstrained 
resolutions. But likewise, under pretence of shunning pre- 
tended excesses, would you refuse to adopt the most necessary 
resolutions? Make a beginning at any rate; the first transports 
soon begin to abate ; and it is much more easy to moderate the 



Serm. IX.] 



ON DEATH. 



149 



excesses of piety than to animate its coldness and indolence. 
Dread nothing from the excessive fervour and transports of 
your zeal; you can never, in that respect, go too far. An indo- 
lent and sensual heart, such as yours, nursed in pleasures and 
effeminacy, and void of all taste for whatever pertains to the 
service of God, does not promise any very great indiscretions 
in the steps of a Christian life. You know not yourselves; 
you have never experienced what obstacles all your inclinations 
will cast in the way of your simplest exertions in piety. Take 
measures only against coldness and discouragement, which are 
the only rock you have to dread. What blindness ! In the fear 
of doing too much for God, we do nothing at all; the dread of 
bestowing too much attention on our salvation prevents us 
from labouring towards it; and we lose ourselves for ever, lest 
we should too surely obtain salvation: We dread chimerical 
excesses of piety, and we are not afraid of a departure from, 
and an actual contempt of piety itself. Does the fear of doing 
too much for fortune and rank check your exertions, or cool 
the ardour of your ambition? Is it not that very hope which 
supports and animates them? Nothing is too much for the world, 
but all is excess for God: We fear, and we reproach ourselves, 
lest we never do enough for an earthly establishment; and we 
check ourselves, in the dread of doing too much for an eternal 
fortune. 

But I go further, and say, that it is a criminal ingratitude to- 
wards God to reject the thought of death, merely because it 
disquiets and alarms you; for that impression of dread and terror 
is a special grace with which you are favoured by God. Alas ! 
how many impious characters exist, who despise it, who claim 
a miserable merit in beholding with firmness its approach, and 
who regard it as the annihilation of their being ! How many 
sages and philosophers in Christianity, who, without renouncing 
faith, limit all their reflections, all the superiority of their talents, 
to the tranquil view of its arrival; and who, during life, exert 
the powers of their reason only in preparing for that last mo- 
ment; a constancy and serenity of mind equally absurd as the 
most vulgar terrors; a purpose the most imprudent to which 
reason can be applied. It is, therefore, a special grace bestow- 
ed on you by God, when he permits that thought to have such 
an energy and ascendancy in your soul; in all probability it 
is the way by which he wishes to recal you to himself: Should 
you ever quit your erroneous and iniquitous courses, it will be 
through its influence : Your salvation seems to depend on that 
remedy. 

Tremble, my dear hearer, lest your hearts should fortify 
itself against these salutary terrors; lest God should withdraw 
from you this mean of salvation, and harden you against all 
the terrors of religion. A favour, not only despised, but even 
regarded as a punishment, is soon followed with the indigna- 
tion, or at least the indifference, of the, benefactor. Should 



150 



ON DEATH. 



[Serm. IX. 



that unfortunately be ever the case, then will the image of 
death leave you all your tranquillity: You will fly to an enter- 
tainment the moment you have quitted the solemnity of a fu- 
neral; with the same eyes will you behold a hideous carcase, 
or the criminal object of your passion; then will you be even 
pleased with yourself for having soared above all these vulgar 
fears, and even applaud yourself for a change so terrible to- 
wards your salvation. Profit, then, towards the regulation of 
your manners, by that sensibility, while it is yet left to you by 
God: Let your mind dwell on all the objects proper to recal 
that image, while yet it has influence to disturb the false peace 
of your passions: Visit the tomb of your ancestors, in the 
presence of their ashes, to meditate on the vanity of all earthly 
things; go and ask, What new, in these dark habitations of 
death, remains to them of all their pleasures, dignities, and 
splendour? Open yourself these gloomy dwellings, and, reflect- 
ing on what they had formerly been in the eyes of men, see 
what they now are; spectres, whose presence you with diffi- 
culty can support; loathsome masses of worms and putrefac- 
tion: Such are they in the eyes of men; but what are they 
in the sight of God! Descend, in idea, into these dwellings of 
horror and infection, and choose beforehand your own place; 
figure yourself, in that last hour, extended on the bed of anguish, 
struggling with death, your limbs benumbed and already seized 
with a mortal coldness; your tongue already bound in the chains 
of death; your eyes fixed, covered with a cloud of confusion, 
and before which all things begin to disappear; your relations 
and friends around you, offering up ineffectual wishes for your 
recovery, and augmenting your fears and regrets by the ten- 
derness of their sighs and the abundance of their tears: Re- 
flect upon that sight, so instructive, so interesting; you then, 
in the dismal struggles of that last combat, proving that you 
are still in life, only by the convulsions which announce your 
death; the whole world annihilated to you; despoiled for ever 
of all your dignities and titles; accompanied solely by your 
works, and ready to appear in the presence of God. This is 
not a prediction; it is the history of all those who die every 
day to your knowledge, and it is the anticipation of your own. 
Think upon that terrible moment; the day, perhaps, is not 
far removed, yet, however distant it may be, you will at last 
reach it, and the interval will seem to you only an instant; and 
the only consolation you then can have, shall be, to have made 
the study of, and preparation for death, the employment of your 
life. 

Lastly. As my final argument: Trace to their source these 
excessive terrors, which render the image and thoughts of death 
so terrible, and you will undoubtedly find them originating from 
the disorders of a criminal conscience: It is not death which * 



Serm. IX.] 



ON DEATH. 



151 



you dread, it is the justice of God which awaits you beyond it, 
to punish the infidelities and crimes of your life: It is, that, 
covered as you are with the most shameful wounds, which dis- 
figure in you his image, you are not in a state to present your- 
selves before him; and that to die in your present situation, 
must be to perish for ever. Purify, then, your conscience, 
place an end to, and expiate your criminal passions; recal God 
to your heart; no longer offer to his sight any thing worthy of 
his anger or punishment; place yourselves in a state to hope 
something, after death, from his infinite mercy: Then shall you 
see that last moment approach with less dread and trembling; 
and the sacrifice which you shall have already made to God, of 
the world and your passions, will not only render easy, but 
even sweet and consoling, the sacrifice you will then make to 
him of your life. 

For. say, What has death so fearful to a faithful soul? From 
what does it separate him? From a world which shall perish, 
and which is the country of the reprobate; from his riches, 
which torment him, of which the use is surrounded with dan- 
gers, and which he is forbid to use in the gratification of the 
senses; from his relations and friends, whom he precedes only 
by a moment, and who shall soon follow him; from his body, 
which hitherto had been either a rock to his innocence or a 
perpetual obstacle to his holy desires; from his offices and dig- 
nities, which, in multiplying his duties, augmented his dangers ; 
lastly, from life, which to him was only an exilement, and an 
anxious desire to be delivered from it. What does death bestow 
on him, to compensate for what it takes away? It bestows un- 
fading riches, of which none can ever deprive him; eternal 
joys, which he shall enjoy without fear or remorse; the peace- 
able and certain possession of God himself, from which he can 
never be degraded; deliverance from all his passions, which 
had ever been a constant source of disquiet and distress; an 
unalterable peace, which he never could find on the earth; and, 
lastly, the society of the just and happy, in place of that of 
sinners, from whom it separates him. What then, O my God! 
has the world so delightful, to attach a faithful soul? To him 
it is a vale of tears, where dangers are infinite, combats daily, 
victories rare, and defeats certain; where every gratification 
must be denied to the senses; where all tempts, and all is for- 
bidden to us; where we must fly from and dread what most 
pleases us; in a word, where, if you suffer not, if you weep 
not, if you resist not to the utmost extremity, if you combat 
not without ceasing, if you hate not yourself, you are lost. 
What, then, do you find so amiable, so alluring, so capable of 
attaching a Christian soul? and to die, is it not a gain, and a 
triumph for him? 

Besides, death is the only object he looks forward to; it is 
the only consolation which supports the fidelity of the just. 



152 



ON DEATH. 



[Serm.. IX. 



Do they bend under afflictions? They know that their end is 
near; that the short and fleeting tribulations of this life shall 
soon be followed by a load of eternal glory; and in that thought 
they find an inexhaustible source of patience, fortitude, and 
joy. Do they feel the law of the members warring against the 
law of the spirit, and exciting commotions which bring inno- 
cence to the very brink of the precipice? They are not ignor- 
ant, that, after the dissolution of the earthly frame, it shall be 
restored to them pure and celestial; and that, delivered from 
these bonds of misery, they shall then resemble the heavenly 
spirits: and that remembrance soothes and strengthens them. 
Do they groan under the weight of the yoke of Jesus Christ; 
and their faith< more weak, is it on the point of relaxing and 
sinking under the rigid duties of the gospel? Ah! the day 
of the Lord is nigh; they almost touch the blessed recompense; 
and the end of their course, which they already see, animates, 
and gives them fresh vigour. Hear in what manner the apostle 
consoled the first Christians: My brethren, said he to them, 
the time is short, the day approaches, the Lord is at the gate, 
and he will not delay; rejoice then; I again say to you, re- 
joice. Such was the only consolation of men, persecuted, in- 
sulted, proscribed, trampled upon, regarded as the scum of the 
earth, the disgrace of the Jews, and the scoff of the Gentiles. 
They knew that death would soon diy up their tears; that for 
them there would then be neither mourning, sorrow, nor suf- 
ferance; that all would be changed; and that thought softened 
every pain. Ah ! whosoever had told these generous justifiers 
of faith, that the Lord would never make them know death, 
but would leave them to dwell for ever on the earth, would 
have shaken their faith, tempted their constancy, and, by rob- 
bing them of that hope, would have deprived them of every 
consolation. 

You, my brethren, are no doubt little surprised at this, be- 
cause death must appear a refuge to men afflicted and unhappy 
as they were. You are mistaken; it was neither their persecu- 
tions nor sufferings which occasioned their distress and sorrow; 
these were their joy, consolation, and pride: We glory, said 
they, in tribulations; it was the state of separation in which 
they still lived from Jesus Christ; that alone was the source 
of their tears, and what rendered death so desirable. 

While we are in the body, said the Apostle, we are sepa- 
rated from the Lord; and that separation was a state of anguish 
and sorrow to these faithful Christians: Piety consists in wish- 
ing for a re-union with Jesus Christ our Head; in sighing for 
the happy moment which shall incorporate us with the chosen 
of God, in that mystical body, which, from the beginning of 
the world, is forming, of every tongue, every tribe, and every 
nation; which is the completion of the designs of God, and 
which will glorify him, with Jesus Christ, to all eternity, 



Serm. IX.] 



ON DEATH. 



153 



Here we are like branches torn from their stem; like strangers 
wandering in a foreign land; like fettered captives in a prison, 
waiting their deliverance; like children, banished for a time 
from their paternal inheritance and mansion; in a word, like 
members separated from their body. Since Jesus Christ, our 
Head ascended to heaven, the earth is no longer the place of 
our establisnment; we look forward in blessed expectation, to 
the coming of the Lord; that desire constitutes all our piety 
and consolation : And a Christian, not to long for that happy 
moment, but to dread, and even look upon it as a misfortune, 
is to fly in the face of Jesus Christ; to renounce all communi- 
cation with him; to reject the promises of faith and the glori- 
ous title of a citizen of heaven; it is to centre our happiness 
on the things of the earth, to doubt a future state, to regard 
religion as a dream, and to believe that all dies with us. 

No, my brethren, death has nothing to a just soul but what 
is pleasing and desirable: Arrived at that happy moment, he, 
without regret, sees a world perish, which he had never loved, 
and which to him had never appeared otherwise than a confu- 
sion of vanities: His eyes close with pleasure on all those vain 
shows which the earth offers, which he had always regarded as 
the splendour of a moment, and whose dangerous illusions he 
had never ceased to dread: He feels without uneasiness, 
what do I say? with satisfaction, that mortal body, which had 
been the subject of all his temptations, and the fatal source of 
all his weaknesses become clothed with immortality: He re- 
grets nothing on the earth, where he leaves nothing, and from 
whence his heart flies along with his soul: He even complains 
not that he is carried off in the middle of his career, and that 
his days are concluded in the flower of his age: On the con- 
trary he thanks his deliverer for having abridged his sufferings 
with his years, for having exacted only a portion of his debt 
as the price of his eternity, and for having speedily consum- 
mated his sacrifice, lest a longer residence in a corrupted world 
should have perverted his heart. His trials, his mortifications, 
which had cost so much to the weakness of the flesh, are then 
his sweetest reflections: He sees all that now vanishes, except 
what he has done for God; that all now abandon him, his 
riches, relations, friends, and dignities, his works alone remain- 
ing; and he is transported with joy, to think that he had never 
placed his trust in the favour of princes, in the children of 
men, in the vain hopes of fortune, in things which must soon 
perish, but in the Lord alone, who remaineth eternally, and in 
whose bosom he goes to experience that peace and tranquillity 
which mortals cannot bestow. Thus tranquil on the past, des- 
pising the present, transported to touch at last that futurity, 
the sole object of his desires, already seeing the bosom of Abra- 
ham open to receive him, and the Son of Man, seated at the 
right hand of his Father, holding out for him the crown of 



154 THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. [Serm. X. 

immortality, he sleeps in the Lord; he is wafted by blessed 
spirits to the habitation of the holy, and returns to the place 
from whence he originally came. 

May you, my brethren, in this manner, see your course ter- 
minated. 



SERMON X. 

ON THE DEATH OF A SINNER, AND THAT OF A 
RIGHTEOUS CHARACTER. 

Rev. xiv. ] 3. 

Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. 

There is something peculiarly striking and incomprehensible 
in the human passions. 

All men wish to live; they look upon death as the most dread- 
ful of all evils; all their passions attach them to life; yet, never- 
theless, those very passions incessantly urge them towards that 
death for which they feel such horror; nay, it should even seem, 
that their only purpose in life is to accelerate the moment of 
death. 

All men flatter themselves that they shall die the death of 
the righteous; they wish it, they expect it. Knowing the im- 
possibility of remaining for ever upon this earth, they trust 
that, before the arrival of their last moment, the passions which 
at present pollute and hold them in captivity, shall be complete- 
ly overcome. They figure to themselves, as horrible the lot of 
a sinner who expires in his iniquity and under the wrath of 
God; yet nevertheless, they tranquilly prepare for themselves 
the same destiny. This dreadful period of human life which 
is death in sin, strikes and appals them; yet, like fools, they 
blindly and merrily pursue the road which leads to it. In vain 
do we announce to them, that in general men die as they have 
lived: They wish to live the life of a sinner, yet, nevertheless, 
to die the death of the righteous. 

My intention, at present, is not to undeceive you with regard 
to an illusion so common and so ridiculous, (let us reserve this 
subject for another occasion); but, since the death of the right- 
eous appears so earnestly to be wished for, and that of the sin- 
ner so dreadful to you, I mean, by a representation of them 
both, to excite your desires for the one, and to awaken your just 



Serm. X.] THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. 



155 



terrors for the other. As you must finally quit this world in 
one of these two situations, it is proper to familiarize yourselves 
with a view of them both, that, by placing before your eyes the 
melancholy spectacle of the one and the soothing consolations 
of the other, you may be enabled to judge which of the lots 
awaits you; and, consequently, to adopt the necessary means to 
secure the decision in your favour. 

In the picture of the expiring sinner, you will see in what 
the world, with all its glory and pleasures, terminates; from the 
recital of the last moments of the righteous man, you will learn 
to what virtue conducts, in spite of all its momentary checks and 
troubles. In the one, you will see the world from the eyes of 
a sinner in the moment of death: And how vain, frivolous, 
and different from what it seems at present, will it then appear 
to you! In the other, you will see virtue from the eyes of the 
expiring righteous man: How grand and estimable will your 
heart then acknowledge it to be ! 

In the one, will you comprehend all the misery of a soul 
which has lived forgetful of its God: In the other, the happi- 
ness of him who has lived only to please and to serve him. In 
a word, the picture of the death of the sinner will make you wish 
to live the life of the righteous; and the image of the death of 
the just will inspire you with a holy horror at the life of the 
sinner. 

Part I. — In vain do we repel the image of death; every day 
brings it nearer. Youth glides away; years hurries on; and 
like water, says the scripture, spilt upon the ground, which can- 
not be gathered up again, we rapidly course towards the abyss 
of eternity, where, for ever swallowed up, we can never return 
upon our steps, to appear once more upon the earth. 

I know that the brevity and uncertainty of life are continual 
subjects of conversation to us. The deaths of our relations, our 
friends, our companions, frequently sudden and always unex- 
pected, furnish us with a thousand reflections on the frailty of 
every thing terrestrial. 

We are incessantly repeating that the world is nothing; that 
life is but a dream; and that it is a striking folly our interest- 
ing ourselves so deeply for what must pass so quickly away. 
But these are merely words : they are not the sentiments of the 
heart; they are discourses offered up at the shrine of custom; 
and that very custom occasions their being immediately and for 
ever forgot. 

Now, my brethren, form to yourselves a destiny on this earth 
agreeable to your own wishes: Lengthen out, in your own 
minds, your days to a term beyond your most sanguine hopes. 
I even wish you to indulge in the enjoyment of so pleasing an 
illusion: But at last you must follow the track which your fore- 
fathers have trod: You will at last see that day arrive, to which 



156 



THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. [Serm. X. 



no other shall succeed; and that day will be the day of your 
eternity: Happy if you die in the Lord; miserable if you de- 
part in sin. One of these lots awaits you; in the final decision 
upon all men, there will be only two sides, the right and the 
left; two divisions, the goats and the sheep. Allow me, then, 
to recal you to the bed of death, and to expose to your view the 
double spectacle of this last hour, so terrible to the sinner and 
so consolatory to the righteous man. 

I say, terrible to the sinner, who, lulled by vain hopes of a 
conversion, at last reaches this fatal moment; full of desires, 
empty of good works; having ever lived a stranger to the Lord, 
and unable now to make any offering to him, but of his crimes, 
and the anguish of seeing a period put to those days which he 
vainly believed would have endured for ever. Now, nothing 
can be more dreadful than the situation of this unfortunate 
wretch in the last moments of his life! Whichever way his 
mind is employed, whether in recalling the past, or considering 
what is acting around him; in a word, whether he penetrates 
into that awful futurity upon the brink of which he hangs, or 
limits his reflections to the present moment, — these objects, the 
only ones which can occupy his thoughts, or present themselves 
to his fancy, only open to him the blackest prospects, which 
overwhelm him with despair. 

For what can the past offer to a sinner, who, extended upon 
the bed of death, begins now to yield up dependance upon life, 
and reads, in the countenances of those around him, the dread- 
ful intelligence that all is over with him? What now does he 
see in that long course of days which he has run through upon 
the earth? Alas! he sees only vain cares and anxieties; pleasures 
which passed away before they could be enjoyed, and iniquities 
which must endure for ever. 

Vain cares. — -His whole life, which now appears to have oc- 
cupied but a moment, presents itself to him, and in it he views 
nothing but one continued restraint and a useless agitation. 
He recalls to his mind all he has suffered for a world which now 
flies from him; for a fortune which now vanishes; for a vain 
reputation, which accompanies him not into the presence of 
God; for friends whom he loses; for masters who will soon for- 
get him; for a name which will be written only on the ashes of 
his tomb. What regret must agitate the mind of this unfortu- 
nate wretch, when he sees that his whole life has been one con- 
tinued toil, yet that nothing to the purpose has been accom- 
plished for himself! What regret, to have so often done violence 
to his inclinations, without gaining the advance of a single step 
towards heaven ! To have always believed himself too feeble 
for the service of God, and yet to have had the strength and 
the constancy to fall a martyr to vanity and to a world which 
is on the eve of perishing ! 

Alas! it is then that the sinner, overwhelmed, terrified at his 



Serm. X.] THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. 157 

own blindness and mistake, no longer finding but an empty 
space in a life which the world had alone engrossed; perceiv- 
ing, that, after a long succession of years upon the earth, he 
has not yet begun to live; leaving history, perhaps, full of his 
actions, the public monuments loaded with the transactions of 
his life, the world filled with his name, and nothing, alas ! which 
deserves to be written in the book of eternity, or which may 
follow him into the presence of God: Then it is, though too 
late, that he begins to hold a language to himself, which we 
have frequent opportunities of hearing: have lived, then, 

onlv for vanity? Why have I not served my God as I have 
served my masters? Alas! were so many anxieties, and so much 
trouble, necessary to accomplish my own destruction? Why, at 
least, did I not receive my consolation in this world? I should 
have enjoyed the present, that fleeting moment which passes 
away from me; and I should not then have lost all. But my 
life has been always filled with anxieties, subjections, fatigues, 
and restraints, and all these in order to prepare for me everlast- 
ing misery. What madness, to have suffered more towards my 
own ruin, than was required to have accomplished my salvation; 
and to have regarded the life of the upright as a melancholy 
and an insupportable one; seeing they have done nothing so 
difficult for God, that I have not performed an hundred-fold 
for the world, which is nothing, and from which I have conse- 
quently nothing to expect." 

Yes, my brethren, it is in that last moment that your whole 
life will present itself to your view; but in very different co- 
lours form those in which it appears to you to-day. At present 
you count upon services performed for the state; places which 
you have filled; actions in which you have distinguished your- 
selves; wounds, which still bear testimony to your valour; the 
number of your campaigns; the splendour of your orders; all 
these appear objects of importance and reality to you. The 
public applauses which accompany them; the rewards with 
which they are followed; the fame which publishes them; the 
distinctions attached to them; all these only recal your past 
days to you, as days full, occupied, marked each by some me- 
morable action, and by events worthy of being for ever pre- 
served to posterity. You even distinguish yourselves, in your 
own minds, from those indolent characters of your own rank, 
who have led an obscure, idle, and useless life, and disho- 
noured their names by that slothful effeminacy which has kept 
them always grovelling in the dust. But, on the bed of death, 
in that last moment when the world flies off and eternity ap- 
proaches, ycur eyes will be opened; the scene will be changed; 
the illusion, Avhich at present magnifies these objects, will be 
dissipated. You will see all things as they really are; and that 
which formerly appeared so grand, so illustrious, as it was done 



158 



THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. [Serm. X. 



only for the sake of the world, of glory, of fortune, will no 
longer appear of the least importance to you. 

You will no longer find any thing real in your life but what 
you shall have done for God; nothing praiseworthy but works 
of faith and of piety; nothing great but what will merit eter- 
nity; and a single drop of cold water in the name of Jesus 
Christ, a single tear shed in his presence, and the slightest mor- 
tification suffered for his sake, will all appear more precious, 
more estimable to you, than all the wonders which the world 
admires, and which shall perish with it. 

Not that the dying sinner finds only cares and anxieties 
thrown away in his past life, he finds the remembrance likewise 
of his pleasures; but this very remembrance depresses and 
overwhelms him: Pleasures, which have existed only for a mo- 
ment: He now perceives that he has sacrificed his soul, and 
his eternal welfare, to a fugitive moment of passion and volup- 
tuousness. Alas ! life had appeared too long to him to be en- 
tirely consecrated to God: He was afraid to adopt too early 
the side of virtue, lest he should be unable to support its dura- 
tion, its weariness, and its consequences. He looked forward 
to the years he had still to run as to an immense space, through 
which he must travel under the weight of the cross, and sepa- 
rated from the world in the practice of Christian works: This 
idea alone had always suspended his good intentions; and, in 
order to return to God, he waited the last stage of life as the 
one in which perseverance is most certain. What a surprise in 
this last hour to find that what had to him appeared so long 
has in reality been but an instant; that his infancy and old age 
so nearly touch each other, that they only form, as I may say, 
one day; and that, from his mother's breast, he has made but 
one step towards the grave. Nor is this the bitterest pang 
which he experiences in the remembrance of his pleasures: 
they have vanished like a dream; but he, who formerly claimed 
an honour to himself from their gratification, is now covered 
with confusion and shame at their recollection : So many shame- 
ful excesses; such weakness and debauchery: He, who piqued 
himself upon reason, elevation of mind, and haughtiness to- 
wards man; O my God! he then finds himself the weakest, 
the most despicable of sinners ! Apparently, perhaps, a life of 
prudence, yet sunk in all the infamy of the senses and the pue- 
rility of the passions! A life of glory in the eyes of men; but, 
in the sight of God, the most shameful, the most deserving of 
contempt and disgrace! A life which success, perhaps, had 
continually accompanied; yet, nevertheless, in private, the most 
absurd, the most trifling, the most destitute of reflection and 
wisdom ! 

Pleasures, in a word, which have been the source of all his 
chagrins; which have empoisoned every enjoyment of life; 



Serm. X.] THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. 



which have changed his happiest days into days of madness and 
lamentation. 

Pleasures for which he has ever paid dear, and of which he 
has never experienced hut the anxieties and the bitterness; such 
are the foundations of this frivolous happiness. His passions 
alone have rendered life miserable to him; and the only mo- 
ments of tranquillity he has enjoyed in the whole course of his 
life, are those in which his heart has been sheltered from their 
influence. The days of my pleasures are fled, says then the 
sinner to himself, but in a disposition of mind very different 
from that of Job: " Those days which have occasioned all the 
sorrows of my life; by which my rest has been broken, and the 
calm stillness of the night changed into the blackest thoughts 
and uneasinesses. Yet, nevertheless, great God ! thou wilt still 
punish the sorrows and distresses of my unfortunate life ! All 
the bitterness of my passions is marked against me in the book 
of thy wrath; and thou preparest for me, in addition to gratifi- 
cations which have always been the source of all my miseries, a 
misery without end, and boundless." 

Behold what the expiring sinner experiences in the remem- 
brance of the past: Crimes which shall endure for ever; the 
weaknesses of childhood; the dissipations of youth; the pas- 
sions and the disorders of a more advanced period: what do I 
know, perhaps even the shameful excesses of a licentious old 
age. Ah ! my brethren, whilst in health, we perceive only the 
surface of our conscience; we recal only a vague and confused 
remembrance of our life; we see only the passions which actu- 
ally enchain us; a complete life, spent in the habits of iniquity, 
appears to us only a single crime. But, on the bed of death, 
the darkness spread over the conscience of the sinner is dissi- 
pated. The more he searches into his heart, the more does he 
discover new stains; the deeper he enters into that abyss, the 
more do new monsters of horror present themselves to his sight. 
He is lost in the chaos, and knows not how to proceed. To en- 
lighten it, an entire new life would be necessary : Alas ! and 
time flies; scarcely do a few moments now remain to him, and 
he must precipitate a confession for which the greatest leisure 
would hardly suffice, and which can precede but an instant the 
awful judgment of the justice of God. Alas I we often com- 
plain, during life, of a treacherous memory; that we forget 
every thing; that the minister of God is under the necessity of 
remedying our attention, and of assisting us to know and to 
judge of ourselves. But in that last moment the expiring sin- 
ner shall require no assistance to recal the remembrance of his 
crimes: The justice of God, which had delivered him up dur- 
ing health to the profundity of his darkness, will then en- 
lighten him in his wrath. 

Every thing around his bed of death awakens the remem- 
brance of some new crime; servants whom he has scandalized 



160 THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. [Serm. X. 



by his example; children whom he has neglected; a wife whom 
he has rendered miserable by unlawful attachments; ministers 
of the church whom he has despised; riches which he has a- 
bused; the luxury which surrounds him, for which the poor 
and his creditors have suffered; the pride and magnificence of 
his edifices, which have been reared up upon the inheritance of 
the widow and the orphan, or perhaps by the public calamity; 
every thing, in a word, the heavens and the earth, says Job, 
shall reveal his iniquity, and rise up against him; shall recal to 
him the frightful history of his passions and of his crimes. 

Thus, the recollection of the past forms one of the most 
dreadful situations of the expiring sinner; because in it he finds 
nothing but labours lost; pleasures which have been dissipated 
the moment almost of their existence; and crimes which shall 
endure for ever. 

But the scenes around him are not less gloomy to this unfor- 
tunate soul: His surprises, his separations, his changes. 

His surprises. — He had always flattered himself that the hour 
of the Lord would not surprise him. Whatever had been said 
to him on the subject from the pulpit had not prevented him 
from assuring himself that his conscience should be properly 
arranged before the arrival of this dreaded moment; he has 
reached it, however, still loaded with all his crimes, without 
preparation, without the performance of a single exertion to- 
wards appeasing the wrath of the Almighty; he has reached it 
while he least thought of it, and he is now to be judged. 

His surprises. — God strikes him in the zenith of his passions; 
in the time when the thoughts of death were most distant from 
his mind; when he had attained to places he had long ardently 
struggled for; and when, like the foolish man in the gospel, he 
had exhorted his soul to repose itself, and to enjoy in peace the 
fruit of its labours. It is in tins moment that the justice of God 
surprises him; and he sees life, with every imaginary hope of 
happiness, blasted for ever. 

His surprises. — He is on the brink of the gulf, and the Al- 
mighty willeth that no one shall dare to inform Mm of his situa- 
tion. His relations flatter him; his friends leave him undeceived: 
They already lament him in secret as dead, yet they continue to 
speak of his recovery; they deceive him, in order that he may 
deceive himself. The Scriptures must be fulfilled: The sinner 
must be taken by surprise in his last moment: Thou hast said 
it, O my God ! and thy words are the words of truth. 

His surprises. — Abandoned by all the succours of art, deliv- 
ered up alone to anguish and disease, he still cannot persuade 
himself that death is near; he flatters himself — he still hopes: 
The justice of God, it would seem, leaves him a remnant of rea- 
son, for the sole purpose of jeducing himself. From his ter- 
rors, his astonishment, his inquietudes, we see clearly that he 



Serm. X.] THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. 



161 



still comprehends not the necessity of death. He torments, he 
agitates himself, as if by these means he could escape death; 
but his agitations are only occasioned by regret for the loss of 
life, and are not the effects of grief for having wickedly spent it. 
The blinded sinner must be so to the end; and his death must 
be similar to his life. 

In a word, his surprises. — He sees now that the world has all 
along deceived him; that it has continually led him from illu- 
sion to illusion, and from hope to hope; that things have never 
taken place exactly as he had promised himself; and that he 
has always been the dupe of his own errors. He cannot com- 
prehend how his blindness could possibly be so constant; that 
for such a series of years he could obstinately continue to make 
such sacrifices for a world, for masters, whose only payment 
has been vain promises; and that his entire life has been one 
continued ^difference on the part of the world to him, and an 
intoxication on his to the world. But what overpowers him is 
the impossibility of remedying the mistake; that he can die only 
once; and tnat, after having badly run his race, he can no more 
recal the past, or, by retracing his steps, undertake a new trial. 
Thou art just, O my God! and thou wiliest that the sinner 
should in advance pronounce against himself, in order that he 
may afterwards be judged from his own mouth. 

The surprises of the dying sinner are, therefore, overwhelm- 
ing; but the separations which take place in that last moment 
are not less so for him. The more he was attached to the world, 
to life, to all its works, the more does he suffer when a separa- 
tion becomes inevitable. Every tie, which now must be broken 
asunder, becomes a wound wnich rankles in his heart; every 
separation becomes a new death to his mind. 

Separation from the riches which, with such constant and la- 
borious attention he had accumulated, by means, perhaps, re- 
pugnant to salvation; in the possession of which he obstinately 
persisted, in spite of all the reproaches of his conscience, and 
which he had cruelly refused to the necessities of his brethren. 
They now, however, escape from him; the mass of earth is dis- 
sipated before his eyes; his love, his regret for their loss, and 
the guilt of having acquired them, are the only remaining proofs 
that they were onee in his possession. 

Separation from the magnificence which surrounds him; 
from his proud edifices, in whose stately walls he once fondly 
believed he had erected an asylum against death; from the va^ 
nity and luxury of his furniture, of all which no portion shall 
now remain to him but the mournful cloth which is to encircle 
him in the tomb; from that air of opulence in the midst of 
which he had always lived. All escape from him; all abandon 
him; and he begins to look upon himself as a stranger in the 
midst of his palaces; where indeed he ought always to have 
considered himself as such; as an unknown who no longer pos- 



162 



THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. [Sehm. X. 



sesses any thing there; as an unfortunate wretch whom they 
are on the point of stripping before his eyes, and whom they 
only allow to gratify his sight with the spoils for a little while, 
in order to augment his regret and his punishment. 

Separation from his honours and offices, which he leaves, 
perhaps to a rival; to which he had at last attained, by wading 
through so many dangers, so many anxieties, so many mean- 
nesses, and which he had enjoyed with so much insolence and 
pride. He is already on the bed_of death, stript of all the 
marks of his dignities, and of all his- titles, preserving that 
of a sinner alone, which he in vain, and now too late, bestows 
upon himself. Alas ! in this last moment, he would glady em- 
brace the most servile condition; he would accept, as a favour, 
the most obscure and the most grovelling station, could but his 
days be prolonged on these conditions; he envies the lot of his 
slaves, whom he leaves behind him: he rapidly advances to- 
wards death, and turns back his eyes with regret, to take a lin- 
gering look of life. 

Separation from his body, for whose gratification he had al- 
ways lived, and with which, by favouring all its passions, he 
had contracted such lively_and intimate ties. He feels that the 
house of mud is crumbling into dust; he feels the approaches 
of death in each of his senses; he no longer holds to life, but by 
a carcase which moulders away; by the cruel agonies which 
his diseases make him feel; by the excess of his love for it, and 
which becomes more lively in proportion as he advances to- 
wards the moment of separation. From his relations, from his 
friends, whom he sees surrounding his bed, and whose tears 
and lamentations wring his heart, and make him cruelly feel the 
anguish of loosing them for ever. 

Separation from the world, where he had enjoyed so many 
distinguished offices; where he had established, aggrandised, and 
arranged liimself, as if it had been intended for the place of his 
eternal residence; from the world, in whose smiles he only lived; 
on whose stage he had ever been one of the principal actors; 
in whose transactions he had always taken such an active part r 
and where lie had figured with so much splendour, and so many 
talents, to render himself conspicuous in it. His body now 
quits it; but his heart and all his affections are centered in it 
still : The world dies to him, but he himself, in expiring, dies 
not to the world. 

Then, it is that the Almighty is great in the eyes of the ex- 
piring sinner. It is in that terrible moment, that the whole 
world, crumbling, disappearing from his sight, he sees only God 
who remaineth, who filleth all, who alone changeth not and 
passeth not away. Formerly he used to complain, with an im- 
pious and ironical air, that it is very difficult to feel any fer- 
vent emotions for a God whom we see not, and not to love be- 
ings whom we perceive, and who interest all our senses. Ah ! 



Serm. X.] THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. 163 



in this last moment, he shall see only God; the hitherto In- 
visible will now be visible to him; his senses, already extin- 
guished, will reject all sensual objects; all shall vanish around 
him; and God will take the place of those delusions which had 
misled and deceived him through life. 

Thus every thing changes to this unfortunate wretch; and 
these changes, with his separations and surprises, occasion the 
last bitterness of the spectacle of death. 

Change in his credit and in his authority. — From the mo- 
ment that nothing farther is to be expected from his life, the 
world ceases to reckon upon him; his pretended friends with- 
draw; his dependants already seek, elsewhere, other protec- 
tors, and other masters; even his slaves are employed in se- 
curing to themselves, after his death, an establishment which 
may suit them; scarcely does a sufficient number remain around 
him to catch his last sighs. All abandon him; all withdraw 
themselves; he no longer sees around him that eager crowd of 
worshippers; it is a successor, perhaps, upon whom they already 
lavish the same attentions; whilst he, says Job, alone in the 
bed of his anguish, is no longer surrounded but by the horrors 
of death; already enters into that frightful solitude which the 
grave prepares for him, and makes bitter reflections on the in- 
constancy of the world and the little dependence to be placed on 
men. 

Change in the public esteem, with which he had been so flat- 
tered, so intoxicated. — Alas! that world, by which he had been 
so celebrated, has already forgotten him. The change which 
his death shall necessarily occasion in the scene, may perhaps 
engage, for a few days, the public attention; but this short in- 
terval over, and he shall be plunged in oblivion; scarcely will 
it be remembered that he has existed; every tongue will now 
be employed in celebrating the abilities of a successor, and ex- 
alting his character upon the wrecks of his memory and repu- 
tation. He already perceives this neglect; that he has only to 
die, and the blank will speedily be filled up that no vestige of 
him shall even remain in the world; and that the upright alone, 
who had seen him surrounded with all his pomp, will say to 
themselves, Where is he now? Where now are those flatteries 
which his greatness attracted? Behold to what the world con- 
ducts, and what is to be the portion of those who serve it! 

Change in his body. — That flesh, which he had flattered, 
idolised so much; that vain beauty which had attracted so many 
glances, and corrupted so many hearts, is already but a spec- 
tacle of horror, whose sight is hardly supportable; it is no 
longer but a carcase, which is approached with dread. That un- 
fortunate creature, who had lighted up so many unjust passions : 
Alas ! his friends, his relations, even his slaves avoid him, conceal 
themselves, dare not approach him but with precaution, and no 
longer bestow upon him but the common offices of decency, and 



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even these with reluctance. He himself shrinks with horror, 
and shudders at himself. "I," says he to himself, who formerly 
attracted every look: "I call my servants, and they give me 
no answer: My breath is corrupt; my days are extinct; the 
grave is ready for me." — Job xix. 17. 

Lastly, change in every thing which surrounds him. — His 
eyes seek some resting-place, some object of comfort, and no 
where do they find but the dreary representations of death. 
Yet even still, the remembrance of the past, and the view of 
the present, would be little to the expiring sinner; could he 
confine himself to these, he would not be so completely miser- 
able; but the thoughts of a futurity convulse him with horror 
and despair. That futurity, that incomprehensible region of 
darkness, which he now approaches, conscience his only com- 
panion; that futurity, that unknown land from which no tra- 
veller has ever returned, where he knows not whom he shall 
find, nor what awaits him; that futurity, that fathomless abyss, 
in which his mind is lost and bewildered, and into which he 
must now plunge, ignorant of his destiny; that futurity, that 
tomb, that residence of horror, where he must now occupy his 
place amongst the ashes and the carcases of his ancestors; that 
futurity, that incomprehensible eternity, even the aspect of 
which he cannot support; that futurity, in a word, that dread- 
ful judgment to which, before the wrath of God, he must now 
appear, and render account of a life of which every moment 
almost has been occupied by crimes. Alas! while he only 
looked forward to this terrible futurity, at a distance, he made 
an infamous boast of not dreading it; he continually demanded, 
with a tone of blasphemy and derision, Who is returned from 
it? He ridiculed the vulgar apprehensions, and piqued him- 
self upon liis undaunted courage. But from the moment that 
the hand of God is upon him; from the moment that death 
approaches near, that the gates of eternity open to receive him, 
and that he touches upon that terrible futurity, against which 
he seemed so fortified — Ah! he then becomes either weak, 
trembling, dissolved in tears, raising up suppliant hands to 
heaven, or gloomy, silent, agitated, revolving within himself 
the most dreadful thoughts, and no longer expecting more con- 
solation or mercy, from his weak tears and lamentations, than 
from his frenzies and despair. 

Yes, my brethren, this unfortunate wretch, who had always 
lulled himself in his excesses; always flattered himself, that 
one good moment alone was necessary, one sentiment of com- 
punction before death, to appease the anger of God, despairs 
then of his clemency. In vain is he told of his eternal mercies; 
he feels to what a degree he is unworthy of them: In vain the 
minister of the church endeavours to soothe his terrors, by 
opening to him the bosom of his divine mercy; these pro- 
mises touch him little, because he knows well that the charity 



Serm. XJ THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. 165 



of the church, which never despairs of salvation for its child- 
ren cannot, however, alter the awful justice of the judgments 
of God. In vain is he promised forgiveness of his crimes; a 
secret and terrible voice resounds from the bottom of his heart, 
and tells him, that there is no salvation for the impious, and 
that he can have no dependence upon promises which are given 
to his miseries rather than to the truth. In vain is he exhort- 
ed to apply to those last remedies which the church offers to 
the dying; he regards them as desperate reliefs, which are 
hazarded when hope is over; and which are bestowed more 
for the consolation of the living, than from any prospect of 
utility to those who are departing. Servants of Jesus Christ 
are called in to support him in this last moment; whilst all he 
is enabled to do, is secretly to envy their lot, and to detest the 
misery of his own; his friends and relations are assembled 
round his bed, to receive his last sighs, and he turns away from 
them his eyes, because he finds still amidst them the remem- 
brance of his crimes. Death, however, approaches : The min- 
ister endeavours to support, by prayer, that spark of life which 
still remains: "Depart, Christian soul," says he: He says 
not to him, Prince, grandee of the world, depart. During his 
life, the public monuments were hardly sufficient for the num- 
ber and pride of his titles : In this last moment, they give him 
that title alone which he had received in baptism; the only one 
to which he had paid no attention, and the only one which can 
remain to him forever— Depart, Christian soul. Alas! he 
had lived as if the body had formed his only being and treasure; 
he had even tried to persuade himself that his soul was nothing; 
that man is only a composition of flesh and blood, and that 
every thing perishes with us: He is now informed that it is his 
body, which is nothing but a morsel of clay now on the point of 
crumbling into pieces; and that his only immortal being is 
that soul, that image of the Divinity, that intelligence, alone 
capable of knowing and loving its Creator, which now prepares 
to quit its earthly mansion and appear before his awful tribunal. 
—Depart, Christian soul. You had looked upon the earth as 
your country; and it was only a place of pilgrimage from which 
you must depart: The Church thought to have announced glad 
tidings to you, the expiration of your exilement, in announcing 
the dissolution of your earthly frame: Alas! and it only brings 
you melancholy and frightful news, and opens the commence- 
ment of your miseries and anguish. 

Depart, then, Christian soul. — Soul, marked with the seal of 
salvation, which you have effaced; redeemed by the blood of 
Jesus Christ, which you have trampled under foot; purified by 
the grace of regeneration, which you have a thousand times 
stained; enlightened by the lights of the faith which you have 
always rejected; loaded with all the tender mercies of Heaven, 
which you have always unworthily profaned. — Depart, Chris- 



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tian soul. Go, and carry before Jesus Christ that august title, 
which should have been the illustrious mark of your salvation, 
but which now becomes the greatest of your crimes. 

Then, the expiring sinner, no longer finding in the remem- 
brance of the past but regrets which overwhelm Mm; in all 
which takes place around him but images which afflict him; in 
the thoughts of futurity but horrors which appal him; no long- 
er knowing to whom to have recourse; neither to created be- 
ings who now leave him, nor to the world which vanishes; 
nor to men who cannot save him from death; nor to the 
just God, whom he looks upon as a declared enemy, and 
from whom he has no indulgence to expect; a thousand hor- 
rors occupy his thoughts; he torments, he agitates himself, in 
order to fly from death which grasps him, or at least to fly from 
himself: From his expiring eyes issue something, I know not 
what, of dark and gloomy, which expresses the fury of his soul; 
in his anguish he utters words interrupted by sobs, which are 
unintelligible, and to which they know not whether repentance 
or despair gives birth. He is seized with convulsions, which 
they are ignorant whether to ascribe to the actual dissolution 
of his body, or to the soul which feels the approach of its Judge : 
He deeply sighs; and they know not whether the remembrance 
of his past crimes, or the despair at quitting life, forces from 
him such groans of anguish. At last, in the midst of these me- 
lancholy exertions, his eyes fix, his features change, his counte- 
nance becomes disfigured, his livid lips convulsively separate; 
his whole frame quivers; and, by this last effort, his unfortu- 
nate soul tears itself reluctantly from that body of clay, falls 
into the hands of its God, and finds itself alone at the foot of 
the awful tribunal. 

My brethren, in this manner do those expire who forget their 
Creator during life. Thus shall you yourselves die, if your 
crimes accompany you to that last moment. 

Every thing will change in your eyes, and you shall not 
change yourselves: You shall die, and you shall die in sin as 
you have lived; and your death will be similar to your life. 
Prevent this misery, O my brethren ! Live the life of the right- 
eous; and your death, similar to theirs, will be accompanied 
with joy, peace, and consolation. This is what I mean to ex- 
plain in the second part of this discourse. 

Part II. — I know, that even to the most upright souls 
there is always something terrible in death. The judgments of 
God, whose profound secrecy they dread; the darkness of their 
own conscience, in which they continually figure to themselves 
hidden stains, known to the Almighty alone; the liveliness of 
their faith, and of their love, which in their own sight magnifies 
their smallest faults; in a word, the dissolution itself of their 



Serm. X.] THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. 167 



earthly frame, and the natural horror we feel for the grave: 
All these occasion death to be attended by a natural sensation 
of dread and repugnance, in so much that, as St. Paul says, the 
most upright themselves, who anxiously long to be clothed 
with that immortality promised to them, would yet willingly 
attain it without being divested of the mortality which encom- 
passes them. 

It is not less true, however, that in them grace rises superior 
to that horror at death which springs from nature; and in that 
moment, whether they recal the past, consider the present, or 
look forward to the future, they find, in the remembrance of 
the past, the end of their troubles; in the consideration of the 
present, a novelty which moves them with a holy joy; in their 
views towards the future, the certainty of an eternity, which 
fills them with rapture; in so much, that the same situations, 
which are the occasion of despair to the dying sinner, become 
then an abundant source of consolation to the faithful soul. 

I say, whether they recal the past: And here, my brethren, 
figure to yourselves a righteous character on the bed of death, 
who has long, by the practice of Christian works, prepared 
himself for this last moment; has amassed a treasure of right- 
eousness, that he may not appear empty-handed in the presence 
of his Judge; and has lived in faith that he may die in peace, 
and in all the consolations of hope: Figure to yourselves this 
soul, reaching at last that final hour, of which he had never lost 
sight, and with which he had always connected all the troubles, 
all the wants, all the self-denials, all the events of his mortal 
life. I say, that nothing is more soothing to him than the re- 
membrance of the past; of his sufferings, of his mortifications, 
of all the trials which he has undergone. Yes, my brethren, it 
appears frightful to you at present to suffer for God. The 
smallest exertions upon yourselves, required by religion, seem to 
overpower you; you consider as unhappy those who bear the 
yoke of Jesus Christ, and who, to please him, renounce the 
world and all its charms. But, on the bed of death, the most 
soothing reflection to a faithful soul is the remembrance of what 
he has suffered for his God. He then comprehends all the 
merit of penitence, and how absurd men are to dispute with 
God a moment of constraint which will be entitled to the re- 
compense of a felicity without end and without measure. For 
then his consolation is, that he has sacrificed only the gratifica- 
tions of a moment, of which there would only remain to him 
now the confusion and the shame; that whatever he might have 
suffered for the world, would in this moment be lost to him; 
on the contrary, that the smallest suffering for God, a tear, a 
mortification, a vain pleasure sacrificed, an improper desire re 
pressed, will never be forgotten, but shall last as long as God 
himself. What consoles him is, that of all the human luxuries 
and enjoyments, alas! on the bed of death, there remain no 



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more to the sinner who has always indulged in them, than to the 
righteous man who has always abstained from them ; that they 
are equally past to them both ; but that the one shall bear eter- 
nally the guilt of having delivered himself up to them, and the 
other the glory of having known how to vanquish them. 

This is what the past offers to a faithful soul on the bed of 
death. Sufferings, afflictions, which have endured but a little 
while, and which are now to be eternally rewarded: The time 
of dangers and temptations past ; the attacks made by the world 
upon his faith at last terminated; the trials in which his inno- 
cence had run so many risks, at last disappeared; the occasions 
in which his virtue had so nearly been shipwrecked, at last for 
ever removed; the continual combats which he had to sustain 
against his passions at last ended; and every obstacle which 
flesh and blood had always placed in the way of his piety for 
ever annihilated. How sweet it is, when safely arrived in port, 
to recal the remembrance of past dangers and tempests ! When 
\ictorious in the race, how pleasing to retrace, in imagination, 
our exertions, and to review those parts of the course most dis- 
tinguished by the toils, the obstacles, and the difficulties which 
have rendered them celebrated. 

The righteous man, then, appears to me, like another Moses, 
expiring on the holy mountain, where the Lord had marked out 
to him his grave: " Get thee up into the mountain Abarim, 
and die," &c. Deut. xxxii. 49; who, before he expired, looking 
down from that sacred place, and casting his eyes over that ex- 
tent of country, the nations and kingdoms he had traversed and 
now leaves behind him, reviews, in imagination, the numberless 
dangers he had escaped; his battles with so many conquered na- 
tions; the fatigues of the desert; the snares of Midian; the 
murmurs and calamities of his brethren; the rocks split in 
pieces; the dangers of Egypt avoided; the waters of the Red 
Sea got over; hunger, thirst, and weariness struggled against; 
and touching at last the happy term of so many labours, and 
viewing from afar that country promised to his fathers, he sings 
a song of thanksgiving and praise to God: dies transported with 
joy, both at the remembrance of so many dangers avoided, and 
at the prospect of that place of rest which the Lord shows him 
from afar, and looks upon the holy mountain, where he is to ex- 
pire, as the reward of his toils, and the happy term of his course. 

Not that the remembrance of the past, in recalling to the dy- 
ing righteous soul the trials and dangers of his past lifey does 
not also remind him of his infidelities and wanderings; but 
these are errors expiated by the sighs of repentance; wander- 
ings which have fortunately been followed by a renewal of fer- 
vour and fidelity; wanderings which recal him to the mercies 
of God to his soul, who hath made his crimes the means of his 
repentance, his passions of his conversion, and his errors of his 
salvation. The grief for his faults, in his last moment, becomes 



Serm. X.] THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. 169 



only a sorrow of consolation and tenderness; the^tears which 
this remembrance draws from him still are no longer but the 
tears of joy and gratitude. 

The former mercies of God to his soul fill him with confi- 
dence, and inspire him with a just hope of more; the past con- 
duct of God, with regard to him, comforts his heart, and seems 
to answer for what he shall experience in future. He no 
longer, as in the days of his penitence and mourning, figures to 
himself the Almighty under the idea of a terrible and severe 
judge, whom he had insulted, and whom it was necessary to 
appease; but as the Father of Mercies, and a God of all conso- 
lation, who prepares to receive him into his bosom, and there 
shelter him from all his afflictions. 

H Awake righteous soul," says then to him, in secret, his 
Lord and his God, 66 Thou who hast drunken the dregs of the 
cup of trembling, thou shalt no more drink it again; the days of 
thy tribulation are past. Shake thyself from the dust, arise, 
and sit down; loose thyself from the bands of thy neck. O 
captive daughter of Zion ! Put on thy strength, put on thy beau- 
tiful garments: Enter into the everlasting joy of thy Lord, 
where thou shalt obtain gladness and peace, and sorrow and 
mourning shall flee away." Isaiah, li. 17. &c. 

First consolation of the upright soul in the bed of death; the 
remembrance of the past.— But all which takes place around 
him; the world which flies from him; all created beings which 
disappear; all that phantom of vanity which vanishes; this 
change, this novelty, is the source still of a thousand consola- 
tions to him. 

We have just seen, that the despair of the dying sinner, in 
viewing what passes around him, is occasioned by his surprises, 
his separations, his changes; these are precisely the sources of 
consolation to the faithful soul in this last moment. Nothing 
surprises him; he is separated from nothing; in his eyes no- 
thing is changed. 

Nothing surprises him. — The hour of the Lord surprises him 
not; he expected, he longed for it. The thought of this last 
moment accompanied all his actions, entered into all his pro- 
jects, regulated all his desires, and animated his whole conduct 
through life. Every hour, every moment, seemed to him the 
one which the upright Judge had appointed for that dreadful 
reckoning, where righteousness itself shall be judged. Thus 
had he lived, incessantly preparing his soul for that last hour. 
Thus he expires, tranquil, consoled, without surprise or dread, 
in the peace of his Lord; death never approaching nearer to 
him than he had always beheld it; and experiencing no differ- 
ence betwixt the day of his death and the ordinary ones of his 
life. 

Besides, what occasions the surprise and the despair of the 
sinner on the bed of death, is to see that the world, in which 



170 



THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. [Serm. X. 



he had ever placed all his confidence, is nothing, is but a dream, 
which vanishes and is annihilated. 

But the faithful soul, in this last moment, ah! he sees the 
world in the same light he had always viewed it; as a shadow 
which flitteth away; as a vapour which deceives at a distance, 
but, when approached, has neither reality nor substance. He 
feels, then, the holy joy of having estimated the world accord- 
ing to its merit, 4 of having judged with propriety; of never be- 
ing attached to what must one day slip from him in a moment; 
and of having placed his confidence in God alone, who remaineth 
for ever, eternally to reward those who trust in him. 

How sweet, then, to a faithful soul, to say to himself, I have 
made the happiest choice; how fortunate for me that I attached 
myself only to God, since he alone will endure to me for ever! 
My choice was regarded as a folly; the world laughed it to 
scorn, and found me whimsical and singular in not conforming 
myself to its ways; but now this last moment verifies all. It 
is death that decides on which side are the wise or the foolish, 
and which of the two has judged aright, the worldly or the 
faithful. 

Thus does the upright soul, on the bed of death, view the 
world and all its glory. When the ministers of the church 
come to converse with him of God and the nothingness of all 
human things, these holy truths, so new to the sinner in that 
last moment, are subjects familiar to him, objects of which he 
had never lost sight: These consolatory truths are then his 
sweetest occupation; he meditates upon, he enjoys them, he 
draws them from the bottom of his heart, where they had 
always been cherished, to place them full in his view, and he 
contemplates them with joy. The minister of Jesus Christ 
speaks no new or foreign language to him; it is the language 
of his heart: they are the sentiments of his whole life. Nothing 
soothes him so much, then, as to hear that God spoken of whom 
he had always loved; those eternal riches, which he had always 
coveted; that happiness of another life, for which he had always 
sighed; and the nothingness of that world which he had always 
despised. All other subjects of conversation become insipid to 
him; he can listen only to the mercies of the God of his fathers, 
and he regrets the moments as lost, which must necessarily be 
devoted to the regulation of an earthly mansion and the succession 
of his ancestors. Great God ! what knowledge ! what peace ! what 
delicious transports! what holy emotions of love, of joy, of con- 
fidence, of thanksgiving, then fill the soul of this righteous 
character! His faith is renewed; his love is invigorated; his 
fervour is excited; his compunction is awakened. The nearer 
the dissolution of the earthly man approaches, the more is the 
new man completed and perfected! The more his mansion 
of clay crumbles, the more is his soul purified and exalted: 
In proportion as the body falls into ruin, the spirit is disen- 



Serm. X.] THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. 171 



gaged and renewed; like a pure and brilliant flame, which as- 
cends and shines forth with additional splendour, in proportion 
as it disengages itself from the remains of matter which held it 
down, and as the substance to which it was attached is consumed 
and <lissipated. 

Alas ! All discourses upon God fatigue the simier on the bed of 
death: They irritate his evils; his head suffers by them, and his 
rest is disturbed: It becomes necessary to manage his weakness, 
by venturing only a few words at proper periods; to do it with 
precaution, lest their length should incommode him; to choose 
the moments for speaking to him of the God who is ready to 
judge him, and whom, he has never known. Holy artifices of 
charity are required, nay, deception is even necessary sometimes, 
to make him bestow a thought upon his salvation. Even the 
ministers of the church but rarely approach him, because they 
well know that their presence is only an intrusion. They are 
excluded as disagreeable and melancholy prophets; his friends 
around him carefully turn the conversation from salvation, as 
conveying the news of death, and as a dismal subject which 
wearies him; they endeavour to enliven his spirits by relating 
the affairs and vanities of the age, which had engrossed him 
during life. Great God! and thou permittest that this unfor- 
tunate wretch shall bear, even to death, his dislike to truth; 
that worldly images shall still occupy him in this last moment; 
and that they shall dread to speak to him of his God whom he 
has always dreaded to serve and to know ! 

But let us not lose sight of the faithful soul: Not only he 
sees nothing on the bed of death which surprises him, but he 
is likewise separated from nothing which he laments or regrets. 
For what can death separate him from to occasion either regret 
or tears? From the world? Alas! from a world in which he 
had always lived as an exile; in which he had found only shame- 
ful excesses which grieved his faith; rocks, at which his inno- 
cence trembled; attentions, which were troublesome to him; 
subjections, which, in spite of himself, still divided him between 
heaven and the earth: We feel little regret for the loss of what 
we have never loved. From his riches and wealth? Alas! his 
treasure was in heaven: His riches had been the riches of the 
poor: He loses them not; he only goes to regain them for 
ever in the bosom of God. From his titles and his dignities? 
Alas! it is a yoke from which he is delivered: The only title 
dear to him was the one he had received in baptism, which he 
now bears to the presence of God, and which constitutes his 
claim to the eternal promises. From his relations and friends? 
Alas! he knows that he only precedes them by a moment; that 
death cannot separate those whom charity hath joined upon the 
earth; and that, soon united together in the bosom of God, they 
shall again form the same church and the same people, and shall 
enjoy the delights of an immortal society. From his children? 



172 THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. [Serm. X. 

He leaves them to the Lord as a father; his example and his 
instructions as an inheritance; his good wishes and his blessing 
as a final consolation : And, like David, he expires in intreating 
for his son Solomon, not temporal prosperities, but a perfect 
heart, love of the law, and the fear of the God of his fathers. 
From his body? Alas ! from that body which he had always 
chastised, crucified; which he considered as his enemy; which 
kept him still dependant upon the senses and the flesh; which 
overwhelmed him under the weight of so many humiliating 
wants; from that house of clay which confined him prisoner; 
which prolonged the days of his banishment and his slavery, and 
retarded his union with Jesus Christ. Ah ! like St. Paul, he 
earnestly wishes its dissolution : It is an irksome clothing from 
which he is delivered; it is a wall of separation from his God, 
which is destroyed; and which now leaves him free and quali- 
fied to take his flight towards the eternal mountains. Thus 
death separates him from nothing, because faith had already 
separated him from all. 

I do not add, that the changes which take place on the bed 
of death, so full of despair to the sinner, change nothing in the 
faithful soul. His reason, it is true, decays; but, for a long 
time past, he had subjected it to the yoke of faith, and extin- 
guished its vain lights before the light of God and the profun- 
dity of his mysteries. His expiring eyes become darkened, and 
are closed upon all visible objects; but long ago they had been 
fixed on the Invisible alone. His tongue is immoveable; but 
he had long before planted the guard of circumspection on it, 
and meditated in silence the mercies of the God of his fathers. 
All his senses are blunted and lose their natural use; but, for 
a long time past, he had himself interdicted their influence. 
He had eyes, and saw not; ears, and heard not; taste, and re- 
lished only the things of heaven. Nothing is changed, there- 
fore, to this soul on the bed of death. His body falls in pieces; 
all created beings vanish from his eyes; light retires; all nature 
returns to nothing; and, in the midst of all these changes, he 
alone changeth not; he alone is always the same. 

How grand, my brethren, does faith render the righteous 
on the bed of death! How worthy of God, of angels, and of 
men, is the sight of the upright soul in that last moment! 
It is then that the faithful heart appears master of the world, 
and of all the created; it is then that, participating already in 
the greatness and the immutability of the God to whom he is 
on the eve of being united, he is elevated above all; in the 
world, without any connexion with it; in a mortal body, with- 
out being chained to it; in the midst of his relations and friends, 
without seeing or knowing them; in the midst of the embar- 
rassments and changes which his death opens to his sight, with- 
out the smallest interruption to his tranquillity: He is already 
fixed in the bosom of God, in the midst of the destruction of all 



Serm. X.] THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. 



173 



things. Once more, my brethren, how grand is it to have lived 
in the observance of the law of the Lord, and to die in his fear \ 
With what dignity does not faith then display itself in the right- 
eous soul! It is the moment of his glory and triumph; it is the 
centre at which the whole lustre of his life and of his virtues 
unite. 

How beautiful to see the righteous man, then, moving with a 
tranquil and majestic pace towards eternity! And with reason 
did the false prophet cry out, when he saw the triumphal marcb 
of the Israelites entering into the land of promise, " Let me 
die the death of the righteous, and let my end be like his." Numb, 
xxiii. 10. 

And, behold, my brethren, what completely fills with joy and 
consolation the faithful soul on the bed of death : It is the thought 
of futurity. The sinner, during health, looks forward to a fu- 
ture state with a tranquil eye : but in this last moment, behold- 
ing its approach, his tranquillity is changed into shudderings and 
terror. The upright man, on the contrary, during the days of 
his mortal life, durst never regard, with a fixed eye, the depth 
and the extent of God's judgments. He wrought out his sal- 
vation with fear and trembling; he shuddered at the very 
thought of that dreadful futurity, where even the just, if judged 
without mercy, shall hardly be saved: But, on the bed of death, 
ah ! the God of peace, who. displays himself to him, calms his 
agitations; his fears immediately cease, and are changed into a 
sweet hope. He already pierces, with expiring eyes, through 
that cloud of mortality which still surrounds him, and sees the 
throne of glory, and the Son of man at his Father's right hand, 
ready to receive him; that immortal country, for which he had 
longed so much, and upon which his mind had always dwelt; 
that holy Zion, which the God of his fathers filled with his 
glory and his presence; where he overfloweth the elect with a 
torrent of delights, and maketh them for ever to enjoy the in- 
comprehensible riches which he hath prepared for those who love 
him; that city of the people of God, the residence of the saints, 
the habitation of the just, and of the prophets, where he shall 
again find his brethren, with whom charity had united him on 
the earth, and with whom he will bless eternally the tender 
mercies of the Lord, and join with them in hallelujahs to his 
praise. 

Ah ! when also the ministers of the gospel come to announce 
to this soul that the hour is come, and that eternity approaches; 
when they come to tell him, in the name of the church, which 
sends them, "Depart, Christian soul; quit at last that earth 
where you have so long been a stranger and a captive: The 
time of trial and tribulation is over: Behold at last the upright 
Judge, who comes to strike off the chains of your mortality: 
Return to the bosom of God from whence you came : Quit now 
a world which was unworthy of you : The Almighty hath at. 



174 



THE DEATH OF A SINNER, &c. [Serm. X. 



last been touehed with your tears; he at last openeth to you the 
gate of eternity, the gate of the upright: Depart, faithful soul; 
go and unite thyself to the heavenly church which expects thee: 
Only remember your brethren whom you leave upon the earth 
still exposed to temptations and to storms: Be touched with 
the melancholy state of the church here below, which has given 
you birth in Jesus Christ, and which envies your departure: 
Intreat the end of her captivity, and her re-union with her 
spouse, with whom she is still separated. Those who sleep in 
the Lord perish not for ever: We only quit you on the earth 
in order to regain you in a little time with Jesus Christ in the 
kingdom of the holy: The body, which you are on the point of 
leaving a prey to worms and to putrefaction, shall soon follow 
you, immortal and glorious. Not a hair of your head shall 
perish. There shall remain in your ashes a seed of immortali- 
ty, even to the day of revelation, when your parched bones shall 
be vivified, and again appear more resplendent than light: 
What happiness for you to be at last quit of all the miseries 
which still afflict us; to be no longer exposed, like your breth- 
ren, to lose that God whom you go to enjoy; to shut your eyes 
at last on all the scandals which grieve us; on that vanity 
which seduces us; on those examples which lead us astray; on 
those attachments which engross us; and on those troubles 
which consume us! What happiness to quit at last a place 
where every thing tires and every thing sullies us; where we 
are a burden to ourselves, and where we only exist in order 
to be unhappy; and to go to a residence of peace, of joy, of 
quiet, where our only occupation will be to enjoy the God 
whom we love!" 

What blessed tidings, then, of joy and immortality to this 
righteous soul! What blessed arrangement! With what peace, 
what confidence, what thanksgiving, does he not accept it ! He 
raises, like old Simeon, his dying eyes to heaven; and viewing 
the Lord, who cometh inwardly, says to him, " Break, O my 
God, when thou pleasest, these remains of mortality; these 
feeble ties which still keep me here : I wait, in peace and in 
hope, the effects of thine eternal promises." Thus, purified by 
the expiation of a holy and -Christian life, fortified by the last 
remedies of the church, washed in the blood of the Lamb, sup- 
ported by the hope of the promises, and ripe for eternity, he 
shuts his eyes with a holy joy on all sublunary creatures: He 
tranquilly goes to sleep in the Lord, and returns to the bosom 
of that God from whence he came. 

My brethren, any observations here would be useless. Such 
is the end of those who have lived in the fear of the Lord: 
Their death is precious before God like their life. Such is the 
deplorable end of those who have neglected him to that last 
hour: The death of sinners is abominable in the eyes of the 
Lord equally as their life. If you live in sin, you will die in 



Serm. XI.] ON CHARITY. 



175 



all the horrors and in all the useless regrets of the sinner, and 
your death shall he an eternal death. If you live in righteous- 
ness, you will die in peace, and in the confidence of the just, 
and your death will only be a passage to a blessed immortality* 
Now, to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy 
Ghost, be all honour and glory, now,, henceforth, and for ever- 
more. Amen. 



SERMON XI. 
ON CHARITY. 
John vi. 11. 

And Jesus took the loaves, and, when he had given thanks, he distributed? 
to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down. 

It is not without design that our Saviour associates the disci- 
ples, in the prodigy of multiplying the loaves, and that he makes 
use of their ministry in distributing the miraculous food among 
a people pressed with hunger and want. He might again, no , 
doubt, have made manna to rain upon the desart, and saved his 
disciples the trouble of so tedious a distribution. 

But might he not, after raising up Lazarus from the dead, 
have dispensed with their assistance in unloosing him? Could 
his almighty voice, which had just broken asunder the chains of 
death, have found any resistance from the feeble bands which 
the hand of man had formed? It is because he wished to point 
out to them, before-hand, the sacred exercises of their ministry; 
the part they were afterwards to have in the spiritual resurrec- 
tion of sinners; and that whatever they should unloose upon 
the earth should be unloosed in heaven. 

Again, when there was question of paying tribute to Caesar, 
he needed not to have recourse to the expedient of Peter's cast- 
ing his hook into the sea for the purpose of producing a piece of 
money out of the bowels of a fish: He who, even from stones, 
was able to raise up children to Abraham, might surely with 
greater ease have converted them into a precious metal, and 
thereby furnished the amount of the tribute due to Caesar. But, 
in the character of the Head of the Church, he meant to teach 
his ministers to respect those in authority; and, by rendering 
honour and tribute to the powers established by God, to set an 
example of submission to other believers. 



176 



ON CHARITY. 



[Seem. XI. 



Thus, in making use, upon this occasion, of the intervention 
of the apostle to distribute the loaves to the multitude, his de- 
sign is, to accustom all his disciples to compassion and liberali- 
ty towards the unfortunate: He establishes you the ministers 
of his providence, and multiplies the riches of the earth in your 
hands, for the sole purpose of being distributed from thence a- 
mong that multitude of unfortunate fellow-creatures which sur- 
rounds you. 

He, no doubt, might nourish them himself, as he formerly 
nourished Paul and Elijah in the desert: without your inter- 
ference he might comfort those creatures which bear his image ; 
he, whose invisible hand prepares food even for the young ra- 
vens which invoke him in their want; but he wishes to asso- 
ciate you in the merit of his liberality; he wishes you to be 
placed betwixt himself and the poor, like refreshing clouds, al- 
ways ready to shower upon them those fructifying streams 
which you have only received for their advantage. 

Such is the order of his providence; it was necessary that 
means of salvation should be provided for all men : riches would 
corrupt the heart if charity were not to expiate their abuse; in- 
digence would fatigue and weary out virtue, if the succours of 
compassion were not to soften its bitterness; the poor facilitate 
to the rich the pardon of their pleasures; the rich animate the 
poor not to lose the merit of their sufferings. 

Apply yourself, then, be whom you may, to all the conse- 
quence of this gospel. If you groan under the yoke of poverty, 
the tenderness and the care of Jesus Christ towards all the wants 
of a wandering and unprovided people will console you: If born 
to opulence, the example of the disciples will now instruct you. 
You will there see, 1st. the pretexts which they oppose to the 
duty of charity confuted: 2dly. You will learn what ought to 
be its rules. That is to say, that in the first part of this dis- 
course we shall establish this duty against all the vain excuses 
of avarice; in the second we shall instruct you in the manner 
of fulfilling it against even the defects of charity; it is the most 
natural instruction with which the history of the gospel pre- 
sents us. 

Part. I. It is scarcely a matter of controversy now in the 
world, whether the law of God make a precept to us of charity. 
The gospel is so pointed on this duty; the spirit and the ground- 
work of religion lead us so naturally to it ; the idea alone which 
we have of Providence, in the dispensation of temporal things, 
leaves so little room on that point to opinion or doubt, that, 
though many are ignorant of the extent of this obligation, yet 
there are almost none who do not admit of the foundation and 
principle. 

Who, indeed, is ignorant that the Lord, whose providence . 
hath regulated all things with an order so admirable and beau- 



Serm. XI.] 



ON CHARITY. 



1T7 



tiful, and prepared food even for the beasts of the field, would 
never have left men, created after his own image, a prey to 
hunger and indigence, whilst he would liberally shower upon a 
small number of happy individuals the blessings of heaven and 
the fat of the earth, if he had not intended that the abundance 
of the one should supply the necessities of the other. 

Who is ignorant, that originally every thing belonged in com- 
mon to all men; that simple nature knew neither property nor 
portions; and that, at first, she left each of us in possession of 
the universe? But that, in order to put bounds to avarice, and 
to avoid trouble and dissensions, the common consent of the 
people established that the wisest, the most humane, and the 
most upright, should likewise be the most opulent; that, besides 
the portion of wealth destined to them by nature, they should 
also be charged with that of the weakest, to be its depositories, 
and to defend it against usurpatipn and violence: consequently, 
that they were established by nature itself as the guardians of 
the unfortunate, and that whatever surplus they had was only 
the patrimony of their brethren confided to their care and to 
their equity? 

Who, lastly, is ignorant that the ties of religion have still more 
firmly cemented the first bonds of union which nature had form- 
ed among men; that the grace of Jesus Christ, which brought 
forth the first believers, made of them not only one heart and 
one soul, but also one family, where the idea of individual 
property was exploded; and that the gospel, making it a law to 
us to love our brethren as ourselves, no longer permits us to be 
ignorant of their wants, or to be insensible to their sorrows? 

But it is with the duty of charity as with all the other duties 
of the law; in general, the obligation is not, even in idea, de- 
nied; but does the circumstance of its fulfilment take place? 
A pretext is never wanting, either to dispense with it entirely, 
or at least to be quit for a moiety of the duty. Now, it would 
appear that the spirit of God hath meant to point out to us all 
these pretexts, in the answers which the disciples made to Jesus 
Christ in order to excuse themselves from assisting the famished 
multitude which had followed him to the desart. 

In the first place, they remind him that they had scarcely 
wherewithal to supply their own wants; ami that only five 
loaves of barley, and two fishes remained; behold the first pre- 
text, made use of by covetousness, in opposition to the duty of 
compassion. Scarcely have they sufficient for themselves; 
they have a name and a rank to support in the world; children 
to establish; creditors to satisfy; public charges to support; 
a thousand expenses of pure benevolence, to which attention 
must be paid; now, what is my income, not entirely unlimited, 
to such endless demands? In this manner the world continu- 
ally speaks; and a world the most brilliant, and the most sump- 
tuous. 

M 



178 



ON CHARITY. 



[Serm. XL 



Now, I well know, that the limits of what is called a suffi- 
ciency, are not the same for all stations; that they extend in 
proportion to rank and birth; that one star, says the apostle, 
must differ in lustre from another; that, even from the aposto- 
lic ages, men were seen in the assemblies of believers, clothed in 
robes of distinction, with rings of gold, while others, of a more 
obscure station, were forced to content themselves with the ap- 
parel necessary to cover their nakedness; that, consequent v, 
religion does not confound stations; and that, if it forbid those 
who dwell in the palaces of kings to be effeminate in their man- 
ners, and indecently luxurious in their dress, it doth not at the 
same time prescribe to them the poverty, and the simplicity of 
those who dwell in cottages, or of those who form the lower 
ranks of the people: I know it. 

But, my brethren, it is an incontestible truth, that whatever 
surplus you may have, belongs not to you; that it is the por- 
tion of the poor; and that you are entitled to consider as your 
own, only that proportion of your revenues which is necessary 
to support that station in which Providence hath placed you. I 
ask, then, is it the gospel or covetousness, which must regulate 
that sufficiency? Would you dare to pretend, that all those 
vanities of which custom has now made a law, are to be held, 
in the sight of God, as expenses inseparable from your condi- 
tion? That every thing which flatters, and is agreeable to you, 
which nourishes your pride, gratifies your caprices, and corrupts 
your heart, is for that reason necessary to you? That all which 
you sacrifice to the fortune of a child, in order to raise him 
above his ancestors; all which you risk in gaming; that luxury, 
which either suits not your birth, or is an abuse of it: would 
you dare to pretend, that all these have incontestible claims on 
your revenues, which are to be preferred to those of charity? 
Lastly, Would you dare to pretend, that, because your father, 
perhaps obscure, and of the lowest rank, may have left to you 
all his wealth, and perhaps his crimes, you are entitled to for- 
get your family and the house of your father, in order to mingle 
with the highest ranks, and to support the same eclat, because 
you are enabled to support the same expense? 

If this be the case, my brethren, if you consider as a suplus 
only, that which may escape from your pleasures, from your ex- 
travagancies, and from your caprices, you have only to be vo- 
luptuous, capricious, dissolute, and prodigal, in order to be wholly 
dispensed from the duty of charity. The more passions you 
shall have to satisfy, the more will your obligation to charity 
diminish; and your excesses, which the Lord hath commanded 
you to expiate by acts of compassion, will themselves become a 
privilege to dispense yourselves from them. There must neces- 
sarily, therefore, be some rule here to observe, and some limits 
to appoint yourselves, different from those of avarice : and behold 
it, my brethren, the rule of faith. Whatever tends to nourish 



Serm. XL] 



ON CHARITY. 



179 



only the life of the senses, to flatter the passions, to countenance 
the vain pomp and abuses of the world, is superfluous to a 
Christian; these are what you ought to retrench, and to set 
apart; these are the funds and the heritage of the poor; you 
are only their depositories, and you cannot encroach upon them 
without usurpation and injustice. The gospel reduces to very 
little the sufficiency of a Christian, however exalted in the world; 
religion retrenches much from the expenses; and, did we live all 
according to the rules of faith, our wants, which would no 
longer be multiplied by our passions, would still be fewer; the 
greatest part of our wealth would be found entirely useless; and, 
as, in the first age of faith, indigence would no longer grieve the 
church, nor be seen among believers. Our expenses continually 
increase, because our passions are every day multiplied; the 
opulence of our fathers is no longer to us but an uncomfortable 
poverty; and our great riches can no longer suffice, because no- 
thing can satisfy those who refuse themselves nothing. 

And, in order to give this truth all the extent which the sub- 
ject in question demands, I ask you, 2dly, Do the elevation and 
abundance in which you are born dispense you from simplicity, 
frugality, modesty, and holy restraint? By being born great, 
you are not the less Christians. In vain, like those Israelites 
in the desert, have you amassed more manna than your breth- 
ren; you cannot preserve for your use more than the measure 
prescribed by the law. Were it not so, our SaAdour would have 
forbidden pomp, luxury, and worldly pleasures but to the poor 
and unfortunate; those to whom the misery of their condition 
renders needless that defence. 

Now, this grand truth admitted; if, according to the rule of 
faith, it be not permitted to you to employ your riches in the 
gratification of your appetites; if the rich be obliged to bear the 
cross, continually to renounce themselves, and to look for no con- 
solation in this world, equally as the poor; what can the design of 
Providence have been in pouring upon you all the riches of the 
earth? And what advantage could even accrue to you from them? 
Could it be in order to administer to your irregular desires ? But 
you are no longer bound to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. 
Could it be in order to support the pride of rank and birth? But 
whatever you give to vanity, you cut off from charity. Could it 
be for the purpose of hoarding up for your posterity? But your 
treasure should be only in heaven. Could it be in order that 
you might pass your life more agreeably? But if you weep not, 
if you suffer not, if you combat not, you are lost. Could it be 
in order to attach you more strongly to the world? But the 
Christian is not of this world: he is citizen of the age to come. 
Could it be for the purpose of aggrandizing your possessions 
and your inheritances? But you would never aggrandize but 
the place of your exile; and the gain of the whole world woidd 
be vain, if you thereby lost vour soul. Could it be that your 



180 



ON CHARITY. [SerM. XL 



table might be loaded with the most exquisite dishes? But you 
well know, that the gospel forbids a life of sensuality and vo- 
luptuousness, equally to the rich as to the indigent. Review all 
the advantages, which, according to the world, you can reap 
from your prosperity, and you will find almost the whole of 
them forbidden by the law of God. 

It has not, therefore, been his design, that they should be 
merely for your own purposes, when he multiplied in your 
hands the riches of the earth. It is not for yourself that you 
are born to grandeur; it is not for yourself, as Mordecai for- 
merly said to the pious Esther, that the Lord hath exalted you 
to this point of prosperity and grandeur; it is for the sake of 
his afflicted people; it is to be the protector of the unfortunate. 
If you fulfil not the intentions of God, with regard to you, con- 
tinued that wise Israelite, he will employ some other, who shall 
more faithfully serve him; he will transfer to them that crown 
which was intended for you; he will elsewhere provide the en- 
largement and deliverance of his afflicted people; for he will 
not permit them to perish; but you, and your father's house 
shall perish. In the designs of the Almighty, you therefore are 
but the ministers of his providence towards those who suffer; 
your great riches are only sacred deposits, which his goodness 
hath intrusted to your care, for security against usurpation and 
violence, and in order to be more safely preserved for the widow 
and the orphan: your abundance, in the order of his wisdom, 
is destined only to supply their necessities; your authority, only 
to protect them; your dignities, only to avenge their interests; 
your rank, only to console them by your good offices: whatso- 
ever you be, you are it only for them; your elevation would no 
longer be the work of God, and he would have cursed you, in 
bestowing on you all the riches of the earth, had he given them 
to you for any other use. 

Ah ! allege, then, no more to us, as an excuse for your hard- 
heartedness towards your brethren, wants which are condemned 
by the law of God; rather justify his providence towards all 
who suffer; by entering into his order, let them know, that there 
is a God for them as well as for you: and make them bless the 
adorable designs of his wisdom, in the dispensation of earthly 
things, which hath supplied them, through your abundance, with 
such resources of consolation. 

But, besides, what can the small contributions required from 
you retrench from those wants, the urgency of which you tell us so 
much? The Lord exacteth not from you any part of your pos- 
sessions and heritages, though they belong wholly to him, and 
he hath a right to despoil you of them. He leaveth you tran- 
quil possessors of those lands, of those palaces, which distinguish 
you and your people, and with which the piety of your ances- 
tors formerly enriched our temples: He doth not command 
you, like the young man in the gospel, to renounce all, to dis- 



Serm. XI.] ON CHARITY. 



181 



tribute your whole wealth among the poor, and to follow him: 
He makethit not a law to you, as formerly to the first believers, 
to bring all your riches to the feet of your pastors: He doth not 
strike you with anathema, as formerly Ananias and Sapphira, for 
daring to retain only a portion of that wealth which they had 
received from their ancestors; you, who only owe the aggran- 
dizement of your fortunes perhaps to public calamities, or other 
shameful means of acquirement: he consenteth, that, as the 
prophet says, you shall call the land by your name; and that 
you transmit to your posterity those possessions which you have 
inherited from your ancestors : He wisheth, that you lay apart 
only a portion for the unfortunate, whom he leaveth in indigence : 
He wisheth, that, while in the luxury and splendour of your ap- 
parel, you bear the nourishment of a whole people of unfortu- 
nate fellow-creatures, you have wherewith to cover the nakedness 
of his servants who languish in poverty, and know not where 
to repose their head. He wisheth, that, from those tables of 
voluptuousness, where your great riches are scarcely sufficient 
to supply your sensuality and the profusions of an extravagant 
delicacy, you drop at least a portion for the relief of the La- 
zuresses pressed with hunger and want: He wisheth, that, while 
paintings of the most absurd and the most boundless price are 
seen to cover the walls of your palaces, your revenues may 
suffice to honour the living images of your God: He wisheth, 
in a word, that, while nothing is spared towards the gratifica- 
tion of an inordinate passion for gaming, and every thing is 
on the verge of being for ever swallowed up in that gulf, you 
come not to calculate your expenses, to measure your ability, 
to allege to us the mediocrity of your fortune, and the embar- 
rasment of your affairs, when there is question of consoling an 
afflicted Christian. He wisheth it; and with reason doth he 
not wish it? What ! You shall be rich for evil, and poor for 
good! Your revenues shall be amply sufficient to effect your 
destruction, and they shall not suffice to save your soul, and to 
purchase heaven ! And, because you carry self-love to the ex- 
treme, every barbarity of heart should be permitted you towards 
your unfortunate brethren? 

But, whence comes it, that, in this single circumstance, you 
wish to lower the opinion that the world has, of your riches? 
On every other occasion you wish to be thought, powerful; 
you give yourselves out as such; you even frequently conceal, 
under appearances of the greatest splendour, affairs already 
ruined, merely to support the vain reputation of wealth. This 
vanity, then, does not abandon you but when you are put in re- 
membrance of the duty of compassion : Not satisfied, then, with 
confessing the mediocrity of your fortune, you exaggerate it; 
and sordidness triumphs in your heart, not only over truth, but 
even over vanity. Ah! the Lord formerly reproached to the 
angel of the church of Laodicea, " Because thou sayest, I am 



182 



ON CHARITY. [Serm. XI. 



rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and 
knowest not that in my sight thou art wretched, and miserable, 
and poor, and blind and naked." But at present he ought, 
with regard to you, to change that reproach, and to say, " O ! 
you complain that you are poor and destitute of every thing, 
and you will not see that you are rich and loaded with wealth: 
and that in times when almost all around you suffer, you alone 
want for nothing in my sight." 

This is the second pretext made use of in opposition to the 
duty of charity; the general poverty. Thus the disciples reply, 
in the second place, to our Saviour, as an excuse for not assist- 
ing the famished multitude, that the place is desert and barren, 
that it is now late, and that he ought to send away the people 
that they might go into the country round about, and into the 
villages, and buy themselves bread, for they had nothing to eat. 
A fresh pretext they make use of to dispense themselves from 
compassion; the misery of the times, the sterility and irregu- 
larity of the seasons. 

But, 1st. Might not our Saviour have answered to the disci- 
ples, as a holy father says, It is because the place is barren and 
desert, and that this people knows not where to find food to 
allay their hunger, that they should not be sent away fasting, lest 
their strength fail them by the way. And, behold, my brethren, 
what I might also reply to you; the times are bad, the seasons 
are unfavourable: Ah! for that very reason you ought to enter 
with a more feeling concern, with a more lively and tender anx- 
iety, into the wants of your fellow-creatures. If the place be de- 
sert and barren even for you, what must it be for so many un- 
fortunate people? If you, with all your resources, feel so much 
the misery of the times, what must they not suffer, those who are 
destitute of every comfort? If the plagues of Egypt obtrude 
even into the palaces of the great, and of Pharaoh, what must 
be the desolation in the hut of the poor and of the labourer? 
If the princes of Israel, afflicted in Samaria, no longer find con- 
solation in their places, to what dreadful extremities must the 
common people not be reduced? Reduced, alas! perhaps like 
that unfortunate mother, not to nourish herself with the blood 
of her child, but to make her innocence and her soul the me- 
lancholy price of her necessity. 

But, besides, these evils with which we are afflicted, and of 
which you so loudly complain, are the punishment of your hard- 
ness towards the poor: God avengeth upon your possessions 
the iniquitous use to which you apply them; it is the cries and 
the groamngs of the unfortunate whom you abandon which 
draw down the vengeance of Heaven upon your lands and terri- 
tories. It is in these times, then, of public calamity, that you 
ought to hasten to appease the anger of God by the abundance 
of your charities; it is then that, more than ever, you should in- 
terest the poor in your behalf Alas ! you bethink yourselves 



Serm. XL] ON CHARITY. 



183 



of addressing your general supplications to the Almighty, 
through these to attain more favourable seasons, the cessation 
of public calamities, and the return of peace and abundance; 
but it is not there alone that your vows and your prayers ought 
to be carried; you can never expect that the Almighty will at- 
tend to your distresses, while you remain callous to those of 
your fellow-creatures; you have here on the earth the masters 
of the winds and of the seasons; address yourselves to the poor 
and the afflicted; it is they who have, as I may say, the keys 
of heaven; it is their prayers which regulate the times and 
seasons; which bring back to us days of peace or of misery; 
which arrest or attract the blessings of heaven: for abundance is 
given to the earth only for their consolation; and it is only on 
their account that the Almighty punisheth or is bountiful to 
you. 

But, completely to confute you, my brethren, you who so 
strongly allege to us the evil of the times, does the pretended 
rigour of these times retrench any things from your pleasures? 
What do your passions suffer from the public calamities? If 
the misfortune of the times oblige you to retrench from your 
expenses, begin with those of which religion condemns the use; 
regulate your tables, your apparel, your amusements, your fol- 
lowers and your edifices according to the gospel; let your retrench- 
ings in charity at least only follow the others; lessen your crimes 
before you begin to diminish from your duties. When the Al- 
mighty strikes with sterility the kingdoms of the earth, it is 
his intention to deprive the great and the powerful of all occa- 
sions of debauchery and excess; enter then into the order of his 
justice and his wisdom; consider yourselves as public criminals, 
whom the Lord chastiseth by public punishments; say to him, 
like David, when he beheld the hand of the Lord weighing 
down his people, " Lo, I have sinned and have done wickedly, 
but these sheep, what have they done? Let thine hand, I pray 
thee, be against me and against my father's house." 

Behold your model : By terminating your disorders, terminate 
the cause of the public evils; in the persons of the poor, offer up 
to God the retrenchment of your pleasures and of your profu- 
sions, as the only righteous and acceptable sacrifice which is 
capable of disarming his anger; and seeing these scourges fall 
upon the earth, only in punishment of the abuses which you 
have made of your abundance, bear you likewise, in lessening 
these abuses, their anguish and bitterness. But that the public 
misfortunes should be perceivable neither in the splendour and 
pride of your equipages, nor in the sensuality of your repasts, 
nor in the magnificence of your palaces, nor in your rage for 
gaming and every criminal pleasure, but solely in your humani- 
ty towards the poor; that every thing abroad, the theatres, the 
profane assemblies of every description, the public festivals, 
should continue with the same vigour and animation, while 



184 



ON CHARITY. 



[Serm. XI. 



charity alone shall be chilled; that luxury should every day 
increase, while compassion alone shall diminish; that the world 
and Satan should lose nothing through the misery of the times, 
while Jesus Christ alone shall suffer in his afflicted members; 
that the rich, sheltered in their opulence, should see only from 
afar the anger of Heaven, while the poor and the innocent shall 
become its melancholy victims: Great God! thou wouldst then 
overwhelm only the unfortunate in sending these scourges upon 
the earth ! Thy sole intention then should be to complete the 
destruction of those miserable wretches, upon whom thy hand 
was already so heavy in bringing them forth to penury and 
want ! The powerful of Egypt should alone be exempted by the 
exterminating angel, while thy whole wrath would fall upon the 
afflicted Israelite, upon his poor and unprovided roof, and even 
marked with the blood of the Lamb! Yes, my brethren, the 
public calamities are destined to punish only the rich and 
powerful; and the rich and the powerful are those who alone 
suffer not: on the contrary, the public evils, in multiplying the 
unfortunate, furnish an additional pretext towards dispensing 
themselves from the duty of compassion. 

Last excuse of the disciples, founded on the great number of 
the people who had followed our saviour into the desart: 
These people are so numerous, said they, that two hundred 
pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them that every one 
may take a little. Last pretext, which they oppose to the duty 
of charity: the multitude of the poor. Yes, my brethren, that 
which ought to excite and to animate charity, extinguishes it: 
the multitude of the unfortunate hardens you to their wants: 
the more the duty increases, the more do you think yourselves 
dispensed from its practice, and you become cruel, by having 
too many occasions of being charitable. 

But, in the first place, whence Comes, I pray you, this mul- 
titude of poor, of which you so loudly complain? I know that 
the misfortune of the times may increase their number: but 
wars, pestilences, and irregularity of seasons, all of which we 
at present experiencej have happened in all ages: tlie calami- 
ties we behold are not unexampled; our forefathers have wit- 
nessed them, and even much more melancholy and dreadful: 
civil dissensions; the father armed against, the child, the brother 
against brother; countries ravished and laid waste by their own 
inhabitants; the kingdom a prey to foreign enemies; no person 
in safety under his own roof: we see not these miseries; but 
have they seen what we witness; so many public and concealed 
miseries; so many families worn out; so many citizens, formerly 
distinguished, now low in the dust, and confounded with the 
meanest of the people? Arts become almost useless? The image 
of hunger and death spread over the cities, and over the fields? 
What shall I say? So many hidden iniquities brought every 
day to light, the dreadful consequences of despair and horrible 



Serm. XL] ON CHARITY. 



185 



necessity? Whence come this, my brethren? Is it not from a 
luxury unknown to our fathers, and which engluts every thing? 
From your expenses which know no bounds, and which ne- 
cessarily drag along with them the extinction of charity ? 

Ah! was the primitive church not persecuted, desolated, 
and afflicted? Do the calamities of our age bear any compari- 
son with the horrors of those times ? Proscription of property, 
exilement and imprisonment were then daily; the most burden- 
some charges of the state fell upon those who were suspected of 
Christianity: in a word, so many calamities were never beheld; 
and, nevertheless, there was no poor among them, says St. Luke, 
nor any that lacked. Ah ! It is, because riches of simplicity 
sprung up, even from their poverty itself, according to the ex- 
pression of the apostle; it is, because they give according to their 
means, and even beyond them; it is, because the most distant 
provinces, through the care of the apostolic ministers, sent 
streams of charity, for the consolation of their afflicted brethren 
in Jerusalem, more exposed than the rest to the rage and hatred 
of the synagogue. 

But more than all that; it is, because the most powerful of 
the primitive believers were adorned with modesty; and that 
our great riches are now scarcely sufficient to support that 
monstrous luxury, of which custom has made a law to us : it is, 
that their festivals were repasts of sobriety and charity; and 
that the holy abstinence itself, which we celebrated, cannot 
moderate among us the profusions and the excesses of the table, 
and of feasts; it is, that having no fixed city here below, they 
did not exhaust themselves in forming brilliant establishments 
in order to render their names illustrious, to exalt their posterity, 
and to ennoble their own obscurity and meanness; they thought 
only of securing to themselves a better establishment in the 
celestial country; and that at present no one is contented with 
his station; every one wishes to mount higher than his ances- 
tors; and that their patrimony is only employed in buying titles 
and dignities, which may obliterate their name and the meanness 
of their origin : in a word, it is, because the frugality of these 
first believers constituted the whole wealth of their afflicted breth- 
ren, and that at present our profusions occasion all their pover- 
ty and want. It is our excesses, then, my brethren, and our 
hardness of heart towards them, which multiply the number of 
the unfortunate : excuse no more then, on that head, the failing 
of your charities; that would be making your guilt itself your 
excuse. Ah ! you complain that the poor overburden you; but 
they would have reason in retorting the charge one day against 
you: do not then accuse them for your insensibility; and re- 
proach them not with that, which they undoubtedly shall one 
day reproach to you before the tribunal of Jesus Christ. 

If each of you were, according to the advice of the apostle, 
to appropriate a certain portion of your wealth towards the 



186 



ON CHARITY. [Serm. XL 



subsistence of the poor; if, in the computation of your expen- 
ses, and of your revenues, this article were to be always regard- 
ed as the most sacred and the most inviolable one, then should we 
quickly see the number of the afflicted to diminish: We should 
soon see renewed in the church that peace, that happiness, and 
that cheerful equality which reigned among the first Christians; 
we should no longer behold with sorrow that monstrous dispro- 
portion, which, elevating the one, places him on the pinnacle of 
prosperity and opulence, while the other crawls on the ground, 
and groans in the gulf of poverty and affliction: no longer 
should there be any unhappy except the impious among us; no 
secret miseries except those which sin operates in the soul; no 
tears except those of penitence; no sighs but for heaven; no 
poor, but those blessed disciples of the gospel, who renoimce 
all to follow their Master. Our cities would be the abode of 
innocence and compassion; religion a commerce of charity; the 
earth the image of heaven, where, in different degrees of glory, 
each is equally happy; and the enemies of faith would again, as 
formerly, be forced to render glory to God, and to confess that 
there is something of divine in a religion which is capable of 
uniting men together in a manner so new. 

But, in what the error here consists, is, that, in the practice, 
nobody considers charity as one of the most essential obliga- 
tions of Christianity; consequently, they have no regulation on 
that point; if some bounty be bestowed, it is always arbitrary; 
and, however small it be, they are equally satisfied with them- 
selves, as if they had even gone beyond their duty. 

Besides, when you pretend to excuse the scantiness of your 
charities, by saying that the number of the poor is endless; 
what do you believe to say? you say that your obligations, with 
respect to them, are become only more indispensable ; that your 
compassion ought to increase in proportion as their wants in- 
crease: and that you contract new debts whenever any increase 
of the unfortunate takes place on the earth. It is then, my 
brethren, it is during these public calamities that you ought to 
retrench even from expenses which at any other period might 
be permitted, and which might even be proper; it is then that 
you ought to consider yourselves but as the principal poor, and 
to take as a charity whatever you take for yourselves; it is 
then that you are no longer either grandee, man in office, dis- 
tinguished citizen, or woman of illustrious birth; you are 
simply believer, member of Jesus Christ, brother of every af- 
flicted Christian. 

And surely say: while that cities and provinces are struck 
with every calamity; that men, created after the image of God, 
and redeemed with his whole blood, browse like the animal, and 
through their necessity go to search in the fields a food which 
nature has not intended for man, and which to them becomes a 
food of death; would you have the resolution to be the only one 



Serm. XL] 



ON CHARITY. 



exempted from the general evil? While the face of a whole 
kingdom is changed, and that cries and lamentations alone are 
heard around your superb dwelling; would you preserve, 
within, the same appearance of happiness, pomp, tranquillity, 
and opulence? And where, then, would be humanity, reason 
reiligion? In a pagan republic,* you would be held as a bad ci- 
tizen ; in a society of sages and worldly, as a soul, vile, sordid 
without nobility, without generosity, and without elevation; 
and, in the church of Jesus Christ, in what light think you can 
you be held? Oh! as a monster, unworthy of the name of 
Christian which you bear, of that faith, in which you glorify 
yourself, of the sacrament which you approach, and even of 
entry into our temples where you come, — seeing all these are 
the sacred symbols of that union which ought to exist among 
believers. 

Nevertheless, the hand of the Lord is extended over our 
people in the cities and in the provinces; you know it, and you 
lament it: Heaven is deaf to the cries of this afflicted kingdom; 
wretchedness, poverty, desolation and death, walk everywhere 
before us. Now, do any of those excesses of charity, become at 
present a law of prudence and justice, escape you? Do you take 
upon yourselves any part of the calamities of your brethren? 
What shall I say? Do you not perhaps take advantage of the 
public misery? Do you not perhaps turn the general poverty 
into a barbarous profit? Do you not perhaps complete the 
stripping of the unfortunate in affecting to hold out to them an 
assisting hand! And are you unacquainted with the inhuman 
art of deriving individual profit even from the tears and the 
necessities of your brethren ! Bowels of iron, when you shall be 
filled you shall burst asunder; your felicity itself will constitute 
your punishment, and the Lord shall shower down upon you 
his war and his wrath. 

My brethren, how dreadful shall be the presence of the poor 
before the tribunal of Jesus Christ to the greatest part of the 
rich in this world! How powerful shall be these accusers? And 
how little shall remain for you to say, when they shall reproach 
to you the scantiness of the succour which was required to 
soften and to relieve their wants : that a single day cut off from 
your profusions, would have sufficed to remedy the indigence of 
one of their years; that it was their own property which you 
withheld, since whatever you had beyond a sufficiency belonged 
to them; that consequently you have not only been cruel, but 
also unjust in refusing it to them; but that, after all, your 
hard-heartedness has served only to exercise their patience 
and to render them more worthy of immortality, while you, 
for ever deprived of those riches which you were unwilling to 
lodge in safety in the bosom of the poor, shall receive for your 



* This discourse was pronounced in 1709, when France was almost desolated by 
war, pestilence, and famine." 



188 



ON CHARITY. [Serm. XL 



portion only the curse prepared for those who shall have seen 
Jesus Christ suffering hunger, thirst, and nakedness in his 
members, and shall not have relieved him. Such is the illusion 
of the pretexts employed to dispense themselves from the duty 
of charity: Let us now determine the rules to be observed in 
fulfilling it; and, after having defended this obligation against 
all the vain excuses of avarice, let us endeavour to saA e it from 
even the defects of charity. 

Part II. Not to sound the trumpet in order to attract the 
public attention in the compassionate offices which we render 
to our brethren;, to observe an order even of justice in charity, 
and not to prefer the wants of strangers to those with whom 
we are connected; to appear feeling for the unfortunate, and to 
know how to soothe the afflicted by our tenderness and affabi- 
lity, as well as by our bounty: in a word, to find out, by our 
vigilance and attention, the secret of their shame; behold the 
rules which the present example of our Saviour prescribes to 
us in the practice of compassion. 

1st. He went up into a desart and hidden place, says the 
gospel; he ascended a mountain, where he seated himself with 
his disciples. His design, according to the holy interpreters, 
was to conceal from the eyes of the neighbouring villages the 
miracle of multiplying the loaves, and to have no witnesses 
of his compassion except those who were to reap the fruits of 
it. First instruction, and first rule; the secrecy of charity. 

Yes, my brethren, how many fruits of compassion are every 
day blasted in the sight of God, by the scorching wind of pride 
and of vain ostentation ! How many charities lost for eternity ! 
How many treasures, which were believed to have been safely 
lodged in the bosom of the poor, and which shall one day ap- 
pear corrupted with vermin, and consumed with rust ! 

In truth, those gross and bare-faced hypocrites are rare which 
openly vaunt to the world the merit of their pious exertions: 
Pride is more cunning, and it never altogether unmasks itself; 
but, how diminutive is the number of those who, moved with 
the true zeal of charity, like our Saviour, seek out solitary and 
private places to bestow, and, at the same time, to conceal their 
holy gifts ! We now see only that ostentatious zeal, which no- 
thing but necessities of eclat can interest, and which piously 
wishes to make the public acquainted with every gift; they will 
sometimes, it is true, adopt measures to conceal them, but they 
are not sorry when an indiscretion betrays them; they will not 
perhaps court public attention; but they are delighted when the 
public attention surprises them, and they almost consider as 
lost any liberality which remains concealed. 

Alas ! our temples and our altars, are they not everywhere 
marked with the gifts and with the names of their benefactors; 
that is to say, are they not the public monuments of our fore- 
fathers and of our own vanity? If the invisible eye of the 



Serm. XL] 



ON CHARITY. 



189 



heavenly Father alone was meant to have witnessed them, to 
what purpose all that vain ostentation? Are you afraid that 
the Lord forget your offerings? If you wish only to please him, 
why expose your gifts to any other eye? Why these titles and 
these inscriptions which immortalize, on sacred walls, your gifts 
and your pride? Was it not sufficient that they were written 
even by the hand of God in the book of life? Why engrave 
on a perishable marble the merit of a deed which charity would 
have rendered imortal? 

Solomon, after having completed the most superb and the 
most magnificent temple of which the earth could ever boast, 
engraved the awful name of the Lord alone upon it, without 
presuming to mingle any memorial of the grandeur of his race 
with those of the eternal majesty of the King of kings. We 
give an appellation of piety to this custom; it is thought that 
these public monuments excite the liberality of believers. But 
the Lord, hath he charged your vanity with the care of attract- 
ing gifts to his altars? And hath he permitted you to depart 
from modesty 5 in order to make your brethren more charita- 
ble? Alas! the most powerful among the primitive believers 
carried humbly, as the most obscure, their patrimony to the 
feet of the apostles: They beheld with a holy joy their names 
and their wealth confounded among those of their brethren, who 
had less than they to offer; they were not then distinguished in 
the assembly of the faithful in proportion to their gifts; honours 
and precedency were not yet the price of gifts and offerings, and 
they knew better than to exchange the eternal recompense which 
they awaited from the Lord for any frivolous glory they could 
receive from men : and now the church has not-privileges enough 
to satisfy the vanity of her benefactors; their places are marked 
out in the sanctuary; their tombs appear even under the altar, 
where only the ashes of martrys should repose. Castom, it is 
true, authorizes this abuse; but custom does not always justify 
what it authorizes. 

Charity, my brethren, is that sweet-smelling savour of Jesus 
Christ which vanishes and is distinguished from the moment 
that it is exposed. I mean not that public acts of compassion 
are to be refrained from: We owe the edification and example 
of them to our brethren; it is proper that they see our works; 
but we ought not ourselves to see them, and our left hand 
should be ignorant of what our right bestows; even those actions 
which duty renders the most shining, ought always to be hidden 
in the preparation of the hearty we ought to entertain a kind of 
jealousy of the public view on their account, and to believe 
their purity in safety only when they are exposed to the eyes of 
God alone. Yes, my brethren, those liberalities which have 
flowed mostly in secret, reach the bosom of God much more 
pure than others, which, even contrary to our wishes, having 
been exposed to the eyes of men, become troubled and defiled, 



190 



ON CHARITY. 



[Serm. XI. 



as I may say, in their course, by the inevitable flatteries of self- 
love, and by the applauses of the beholders; like those rivers 
which have flowed mostly under ground, and which pour their 
streams into the ocean pure and undefiled, while, on the con- 
trary, those which have traversed plains and countries, exposed 
to the day, carry there, in general, only muddy waters, and 
drag alone with them the wrecks, carcasses and slime, which 
they have amassed in their course. Behold, then, the first rule 
of charity which our Saviour here lays down; to shun show and 
ostentation in all works of compassion; to be unwilling to have 
your name mentioned in them, either on account of the rank 
which you may here hold, or from the glory of having been the 
first promoter, or from the noise which they may make in the 
world, and not to lose upon the earth that which charity had 
amassed only for heaven. 

The second circumstance which I remark in our gospel is, 
that no one of all the multitude who present themselves to Jesus 
Christ is rejected; all are indiscriminately relieved; and we do 
not read, that, with regard to them, our Saviour hath used any 
distinction or preference. Second rule: charity is universal; 
it banishes those capricious liberalities which seem to open the 
heart to certain wants, only in order to shut it against all others. 
You find persons in the world, who, under the pretexts of hav- 
ing stated charities and places destined to receive them, are 
callous to all other wants. In vain would you inform them 
that a family is on the brink of ruin, and that a very small 
assistance would extricate it; that a young person hangs over 
a precipice, and must necessarily perish, if some friendly and 
assisting hand be not held out; that a meritorious and useful 
establishment must fall, if not supported by a renewal of charity: 
these are not necessities after their taste; and, in placing else- 
where some trifling bounties, they imagine to have purchased 
the light of viewing with a dry eye and an indifferent heart 
every other description of misery. 

I know that charity hath its order and its measure; that in 
its practice it ought to use a proper distinction; that justice re- 
quires a preference to certain wants; but I would not have that 
methodical charity, if I may thus speak, which to a point, 
knows where to stop; which has its days, its places, its persons, 
and its limits; which, beyond these, is cruel, and can settle 
with itself to be affected only in certain times and by certain 
wants. Ah! are we thus masters of our hearts when we truly 
love our brethren? Can we, at our will, mark out to ourselves 
the moments of warmth and of ^difference? Charity, that holy 
love, is it so regular when it truly inflames the heart? Has it 
not, if I may say so, its transports and excesses? And do not 
occasions sometimes occur so truly affecting, that, did but a 
single spark of charity exist in your heart, it would show itself, 



Serm. XL] 



ON CHARITY. 



191 



and in the instant would open your bowels of compassion and 
your riches to your brethren. 

I would not have that rigidly circumspect charity which is 
never done with its scrutiny, and which always mistrusts the 
truth of the necessities laid open to it. See if, in that multi- 
tude which our Saviour filleth, he apply himself to separate 
those whom idleness or the sole hope of corporeal nourishment 
had perhaps attracted to the desert, and who might still have 
had sufficient strength left to go and search for food in the 
neighbouring villages; no one is excepted from his divine boun- 
ty. Is the being reduced to feign wretchedness not a sufficient 
misery of itself? Is it not preferable to assist fictitious wants, 
rather than to run the risk of refusing aid to real and melancholy 
objects of compassion? When an impostor should even deceive 
your charity, where is the loss? Is it not always Jesus Christ 
who receives it from your hand? And is your recompense at- 
tached to the abuse which may be made of your bounty, or to 
the intention itself which bestows it? 

From this rule there springs a third, laid down in the history 
of our gospel, at the same time with the other two; it is, that 
not only ought charity to be universal, but likewise mild, affa- 
ble, and compassionate. Jesus Christ, beholding these people 
wandering and unprovided at the foot of the mountain, is 
touched with compassion; he is affected at the sight, and the 
wants of the multitude awaken his tenderness and pity. Third 
rule: the gentleness of charity. 

We often accompany pity with so much asperity towards the 
unfortunate, while stretching out to them a helping hand: we 
look upon them with so sour and so severe a countenance, 
that a simple denial had been less galling to them than a charity 
so harshly and so unfeelingly bestowed; for the pity which ap- 
pears affected by our misfortunes, consoles them almost as much 
as the bounty which relieves them. We reproach to them their 
strength, their idleness, their wandering and vagabond manners; 
we accuse their own conduct for their indigence and wretched- 
ness; and, in succouring, we purchase the right of insulting 
them. But, were the unhappy creature whom you outrage 
permitted to reply; if the abjectness of his situation had not 
put the check of shame and respect upon his tongue; what do 
you reproach to me, would he say? An idle life, and useless 
and vagabond manners. But what are the cares which in your 
opulence engross you? The cares of ambition, the anxieties of 
fortune, the impulses of the passions, the refinements of volup- 
tuousness: I may be an unprofitable servant, but are you not 
yourself an unfaithful one? Ah! if the most culpable were al- 
ways to be the poorest and the most unfortunate in this world, 
would your lot be superior to mine? You reproach me with a 
strength which I apply to no purpose; but to what use do you 
a PPty y our own? Because I work not I ought not to have food; 



192 



ON CHARITY. 



[Serm. XI. 



but are you dispensed yourself from that law? Are you rich 
merely that you may pass your life in a shameful effeminacy and 
sloth? Ah! the Lord will judge betwixt you and me; and be- 
fore his awful tribunal it shall be seen whether your voluptu- 
ousness and profusions were more allowable in you than the in- 
nocent artifice which I employ to attract assistance to my suf- 
ferings. 

Yes, my brethren, let us at least offer to the unfortunate, 
hearts feeling for their wants; if the mediocrity of our fortune 
permit us not altogether to relieve our indigent fellow-creatures, 
let us, by our humanity, at least, soften the yoke of poverty. 
Alas ! we give tears to the chimerical adventures of a theatrical 
personage; we honour fictitious misfortunes with real sensibili- 
ty; we depart from a repfe'seiiiation with hearts still moved for 
the disasters of a fabulous hero; and a member of Jesus Christ, 
an inheritor of heax n, and your brother, whom you encounter 
in your way from thence, perhaps sinking under disease and 
penury, and who wishes to inform yon of the excess of his suf- 
ferings, finds you callous ! And you turn your eyes with dis- 
gust from that spectacle^ and deign not to listen to him? And 
you quit him even with a rudeness and brutality which tend to 
wring his heart with sorrow ! Inhuman soul ! have you then 
left all your sensibility on an infamous theatre? Doth the spec- 
tacle of Jesus Christ suffering in one of his members offer no- 
thing worthy of your pity? And, that your heart may be touched, 
must the ambition, the revenge, the voluptuousness, and all the 
other horrors of the pagan ages be revived. 

But, it is not enough that we offer hearts feeling for the dis- 
tresses which present themselves to our view: charity goes far- 
ther; it does not indolently await those occasions which chance 
may throw in its way; it knows how to search them out, and 
even to anticipate them itself. Last rule; the vigilance of chari- 
ty. Jesus Christ waits not till those poor people address them- 
selves to him and lay open their wants : He is the first to dis- 
cover them; scarcely has he found them out, when, with Philip, 
he searches the means of relieving them. That charity? which 
is not vigilant, anxious after the calamities of which it is yet 
ignorant, ingenious in discovering those which endeavour to 
remain concealed, which require to be solicited, pressed, and 
even importuned, resembles not the charity of Jesus Christ; 
we must watch, and penetrate the obscurity which shame op- 
poses to our bounties: this is not a simple advice; it is the conse- 
quence of the precept of charity. The pastors, who, according 
to faith, are the fathers of the people, are obliged to watch over 
their spiritual concerns; and that is one of the most essential 
functions of their ministry; the rich and the powerful are es- 
tablished by God; the fathers and the pastors of the poor, ac- 
cording to the body. They are bound then to watch continu- 
ally over their necessities : if, through want of vigilance, they 



Serm. XL] ON CHARITY, 193 



escape their attention, they are guilty before God of all the 
consequences, which a small succour in time would have pre- 
vented. 

It is not, that you are required to find out all the secret 
necessities of a city; but care and attention are exacted of you: 
It is required, that you, who, through your wealth or birth, 
hold the first rank in a department, shall not be surrounded, 
unknown to you, with thousands of unfortunate fellow-crea- 
tures, who pine in secret, and whose eyes are continually 
wounded with the pomp of your train, and who, besides their 
wretchedness, suffer again, as I may say, in your prosperity: 
It is required, that you, who, amid all the pleasures of the 
court, or of the city, see flowing into your hands the fruits 
of the sweat and of the labour ^ f go many unfortunate people, 
who inhabit your lands and your fields; it is required, that you 
be acquainted with those whom the toils , of industry and of 
age have exhausted, and who, in their humble dwellings, drag 
on the wretched remains of dotage and poverty; those whom 
a languishing health renders incapable of labour, their only 
resource against indigence and want; those whom sex and age 
expose to seduction, and whose innocence you might have been 
enabled to preserve. Behold what is required, and what with 
every right of justice is exacted from you; behold the poor 
with whom the Lord hath charged you, and for whom you 
shall answer to him; the poor, whom he leaveth on the earth 
only for your sake, and to whom his providence hath assigned 
no other resource than your wealth and your bounty, 

Now, are they even known to you? Do you charge their 
pastors to make them known to you? Are these the cares which 
occupy you, when you show yourself in the midst of your lands 
and possessions? Ah! It is with cruelty to screw your claims 
from the hands of these unfortunate people; it is to tear from 
their bowels the innocent price of their toil, without regard to 
their want, to the misery of the times which you allege to us, 
to their tears, and often to their despair: What shall I say? 
It is perhaps to crush down their weakness, to be their tyrant, 
and not their lord and their father. O God! Cursest thou 
not these cruel generations, and these riches of iniquity? 
Dost thou not stamp upon them the marks of misfortune and 
desolation, and which shall soon blast the source of their 
families; which wither the root of a proud posterity: which 
produce domestic discord, public disgraces, the fall and total 
extinction of houses? Alas! We are sometimes astonished to 
see fortunes apparently the best established, go to wreck in an 
instant; those ancient, and formerly so illustrious names fallen 
into obscurity, no longer to offer to our view but the melan- 
choly wrecks of their ancient splendour; and their estates be- 
come the property of their rivals, or perhaps of their own ser- 
vants. Ah! Could we investigate the source of their misfor- 

N 



194 



ON CHARITY. 



[Sehm. XI. 



tunes if their ashes, and the pompous wrecks, which in the 
pride of their monuments remain to us, of their glory, could 
speak: Do you see, they would say to us, these sad marks of 
our grandeur? It is the tears of the poor whom we neglected, 
whom we oppressed, which have gradually sapped, and at last 
have totally overthrown them; their cries have drawn down 
the thunder of heaven upon out' palaces: The Lord hath blown 
upon our superb edifices, and Upon our fortune, and hath dissi- 
pated them like dust: let the name of the poor be honourable 
in thy sight, if thou wish that your names may never perish in 
the memory of men; let compassion sustain your houses, if 
you wish that your posterity be not buried under their ruins: 
become wise at our cost; and let our misfortunes, in teaching 
you our faults, teach you also to shun them. 

And behold, my brethren, (that I may say something respect- 
ing it, before I conclude, ) the first advantage of Christian cha- 
rity; blessings even in this world. The bread, blessed by our 
Saviour, multiplies in the hands of the Apostles who distribute 
it; five thousand are satisfied; and twelve baskets can hardly 
contain the remnants gathered up; that is to say, that the gifts 
of charity are riches of benediction, which multiply in pro- 
portion as they are distributed, and which bear along with them 
into our houses a source of happiness and abundance. Yes, 
my brethren, charity is a gain: it is a holy usury; it is a 
principle which returns, even here below, an hundred fold. 
You sometimes complain of a fatality in your affairs: Nothing 
succeeds with you; men deceive you; rivals supplant you; 
masters neglect you; the elements conspire against you; the 
best concerted schemes are blasted: associate with you the 
poor; divide with them the increase of your fortune; in pro- 
portion as your prosperity augments, do you augment your 
benefactions; flourish for them as well as for yourself: ^God 
himself shall then be interested in your success; you shall have 
foimd out the secret of engaging him in your fortime, and he 
will preserve; what do I say? He will bless, he will multiply 
riches, in which He sees blended the portion of Hs afflicted 
member. 

This is a truth, confirmed by the experience of all ages: 
Charitable families are continually seen to prosper; a watchful 
Providence presides over all their affairs; where others are 
ruined they become rich: they are seen to flourish, but the 
secret canal is not perceived, which pours in upon them their 
property: they are the fleeces of Gideon, covered with the 
dew of Heaven, while all around is barren and dry. 

Such is the first advantage of compassion, I say nothing even 
of the pleasure, which we ought to feel in the delightful task 
of soothing those who suffer, in making a fellow-creature 
happy, in reigning over hearts, and in attracting upon our- 
selves the innocent tribute of their acclamations and their 



Serm. XL] 



ON CHARITY. 



195 



thanks. O! were we to reap but the pleasure of bestowing, 
would it not be an ample recompense to a worthy heart? 
What has even the majesty of the throne more delicious than 
the power of dispensing favours? Would princes be much 
attached to their grandeur, and to then- power, were they con- 
fined to a solitary enjoyment of them? No, my brethren, make 
your riches as subservient as you will, to your pleasures, to 
your profusions, and to your caprices; but never will you em- 
ploy them in a way which shall leave a joy so pure, and so 
worthy of the heart, as in that of comforting the unfortunate. 

What, indeed, can be more grateful to the heart, than the 
confidence that there is not a moment in the day in which 
some afflicted souls are not raising up their hands to Heaven 
for us, and blessing the day which gave us birth? Hear that 
multitude whom Jesus Christ hath filled; the air resounds 
with their blessings and thanks: they say to themselves, this 
is a prophet; they wish to establish him their king. Ah! 
Were men to choose their masters, it would neither be the 
most noble, nor the most valiant; it would be the most com- 
passionate, the most humane, the most charitable, the most feel- 
ing : Masters who, at the same time, would be their fathers. 

Lastly, I need not add that Christian charity assists in ex- 
piating the crimes of abundance; and that it is almost the only 
mean of salvation which Providence hath provided for you, 
who are born to prosperity. Were charity insuflicient to re- 
deem our offences, we might certainly think ourselves entitled 
to complain, says a holy Father; we might take it ill, that God 
had deprived men of so easy a mean of salvation; at least 
might we say that, could we but open the gates of heaven, 
through the means of riches, and purchase with our whole 
wealth the glory of the holy, we then should be happy. Well, 
my brethren, continues the holy Father, profit by this privilege, 
seeing it is granted to you; hasten, before your riches moulder 
away, to deposit them in the bosom of the poor, as the price 
of the kingdom of heaven: the malice of men might perhaps 
have deprived you of them; your passions might have perhaps 
swallowed them up; the turns of fortune might have trans- 
ferred them to other hands; death, at last, would sooner or 
later have separated you from them: Ah! charity alone de- 
posits them beyond the reach of all these accidents; it renders 
you their everlasting possessor; it lodges them in safety in the 
eternal tabernacles, and gives you the right of for ever enjoying 
them in the bosom of God himself. 

Are you not happy in being able to assure to yourself admit- 
tance into heaven by means so easy? In being able, by clothing 
the naked, to efface from the book of divine justice the ob- 
scenities, the luxury, and the irregularities of your younger 
years? In being able, by filling the hungry, to repair all the 
sensualities of your life? Lastly, in being able, by sheltering 



196 



ON AFFLICTIONS. . [Serm. XII. 



innocence in the asylums of compassion, to blot out from the 
remembrance of God the ruin of so many souls, to whom you 
have been a stumbling-block? Great God! what goodness to 
man, to consider as meritorious a virtue which costs so little to 
the heart! To number in our favour feelings of humanity of 
which we could never divest ourselves, without being, at the 
same time, divested of our nature; to be willing to accept, as 
the price of an eternal kingdom, frail riches, which we even 
enjoy only through thy bounty; which we could never continue 
to possess, and from which, after a momentary and fleeting en- 
joyment, we must at last be separated! Nevertheless, mercy 
is promised to him who shall have shown it; a sinner, still feel- 
ing to the calamities of his brethren, will not continue long 
insensible to the inspirations of heaven; grace still reserves 
claims upon a heart in which charity has not altogether lost its 
influence; a good heart cannot long continue a hardened one; 
that principle of humanity alone, which operates in rendering 
the heart feeling for the wants of others, is a preparation, as it 
were, for penitence and salvation; and while charity still acts 
in the heart, a happy conversion is never to be despaired of. 
Love then the poor as your brethren; cherish them as your 
offspring; respect them as Jesus Christ himself, in order that 
he say to you on the great day, " Come, ye blessed of my 
Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foun- 
dation of the world. For I was an hungered, and ye gave me 
meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, 
and ye took me in; I was naked, and ye clothed me; I was 
sick, and ye visited me: For, inasmuch as ye have done it 
unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it 
unto me." 



SERMON XII. 

ON AFFLICTIONS. 

Matthew xi. 6. 

And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me. 

It is a blessing, and a rare blessing, then, not to be offended 
in Jesus Christ. But what was there, or what could there be 
in him, who is the wisdom itself, and the glory of the Father, 
the substantial image of all perfection, which could give subject 
of scandal to men? His cross, my dearest brethren, which was 
formerly the shame of the Jews, and is, and shall be, to the 



Serm. XIL] on afflictions. 



end of ages, the shame of the greatest part of Christians. 
But, when I say that the cross of the Saviour is the shame of 
the most of Christians, I mean not only the cross that he bore, 
I mean more especially that which we are obliged, from his 
example, to bear; without which, he rejects us as his disciples, 
and denies us any participation of that glory into which he has 
entered, through the cross alone. 

Behold what displeases us, and what we find to complain of 
in our divine Saviour. We would wish, that since he was to 
suffer, his sufferings had been a title, as it were, of exemption, 
which had merited to us the privilege of not suffering with 
him. Let us dispel this error, my dearest brethren: the only 
thing which depends on us, is that of rendering our sufferings 
meritorious; but to suffer, or not to suffer, is not left to our 
choice. Providence has so wisely dispensed the good and evil 
of this life, that each in his station, however happy his lot may 
appear, finds crosses and afflictions, which always counter- 
balance the pleasures of it. There is no perfect happiness on 
the earth; for it is not here the time of consolations, but the 
time of sufferance. Grandeur hath its subjections and its dis- 
quiets; obscurity, its hiimiliations and its scorns; the world, 
its cares and its caprices; retirement, its sadness and weari- 
ness; marriage, its antipathies audits frenzies; friendship, its 
losses or its perfidies; piety itself, its repugnances and its dis- 
gusts: in a word, by a destiny inevitable to the children of 
Adam, each one finds his own path strewed with brambles 
and thorns. The apparently happiest condition hath its secret 
sorrows, which empoison all its felicity: the throne is the 
seat of chagrins equally as the lowest place; superb palaces 
conceal the cruellest discontents, equally as the hut of the poor 
and of the humble labourer; and, lest our place of exile should 
become endeared to us, we always feel, in a thousand different 
ways, that something is yet wanting to our happiness. 

Nevertheless, destined to suffer, we cannot love the suffer- 
ances; continually stricken with some affliction, we are unable 
to make a merit of our pains; never happy, our crosses, become 
necessary, cannot at least become useful to us. We are ingeni- 
ous in depriving ourselves of the merit of all our sufferances. 
One while we seek, in the weakness of our own heart, the ex- 
cuse of our peevishness and of our murmurings; another, in 
the excess or in the nature of our afflictions; and again, in the 
obstacles which they seem to us to cast in the way of our- salva- 
tion; that is to say, one while we complain of being too weak 
to bear our sufferings with patience; another, that they are too 
excessive; and lastly, that it is impossible in that situation to 
pay attention to salvation. 

Such are the three pretexts continually opposed in the world 
to the Christian use of affliction: the pretext of self- weakness ; 
the pretext of the excess or the nature of our afflictions; the 
pretext of the obstacles which they seem to place in the way of 



198 



ON AFFLICTIONS. [Serm. XIL 



our salvation. These are the pretexts we have now to over- 
throw, by opposing to them the rules of faith. Attend, then, 
be whom ye may, and learn that the cause of condemnation to 
most men is not pleasures alone : Alas ! they are so rare on the 
earth, and so narrowly followed by disgust: it is likewise the 
unchristian use they make of afflictions. 

Part I. The language most common to the souls afflicted 
by the Lord, is that of alleging their own weakness in order to 
justify the unchristian use they make of their afflictions. They 
complain that they are not endowed wjth a force of mind suf- 
ficient to preserve under them a submissive and a patient 
heart; that nothing is more conducive to happiness than the 
want of feeling; that this character saves us endless vexations 
and chagrins inevitable in life; but that we cannot fashion to 
ourselves a heart according to our own wishes; that religion 
doth not render unfeeling and stoical those who are born with 
the tender feelings of humanity, and that the Lord is too just to 
make a crime to us even of our misfortunes. 

But, to overthrow an illusion so common and so unworthy of 
piety, remark, in the first place, That when Jesus Christ hath 
commanded to all believers to bear with submission and with 
love the crosses proposed for us by his goodness, he hath not 
added that an order so just, so consoling, so conformable to his 
examples, should concern only the unfeeling and impatient 
soids. He hath not distinguished among his disciples those 
whom nature, pride, or reflection had rendered firmer and more 
constant, from those whom tenderness and humility had en- 
dowed with more feeling, in order to make a duty to the first 
of a patience and an insensibility which cost them almost no- 
thing, and to excuse the others to whom they become more 
difficult. 

On the contrary, his divine precepts are cures; and the more 
we are inimical to them through the character of our heart, the 
more are they proper for, and become necessary to us. It is 
because you are weak, and that the least contradictions always 
excite you so much against sufferances, that the Lord must pu- 
rify you by tribulations and sorrows: for it is not the strong 
who have occasion to be tried, it is the weak. 

In effect, what is it to be weak and repining? It is an exces- 
sive self-love; it is to give all to nature, and nothing to faith: 
it is to give way to every impulse of inclination, and to live 
solely for ease and self-enjoyment, as constituting the chief 
happiness of man. Now, in this situation, and with this exces- 
sive fund of love for the world and for yourself, if the Lord 
were not to provide afflictions for your weakness; if he did not 
strike your body with a habitual languor which renders the 
world insipid to you; if he did not send losses and vexations, 
which force you, through decency, to regularity and retirement ; 



Serm. XII. ] 



ON AFFLICTIONS. 



199 



if he did not overthrow certain projects, which, leaving your 
fortune more obscure, remove you from the great dangers; if 
he did not place you in certain situations where irksome and 
inevitable duties employ your best days; in a word, if he did 
not place betwixt your weakness and you a barrier which 
checks and stops you, alas! your innocence would soon be 
wrecked; you would soon make an improper and fatal use of 
peace and prosperity; you who find no security even amid af- 
flictions and troubles. And seeing that, afflicted and separated 
from the world and from pleasures, you cannot return to God, 
what would it be did a more happy situation leave you no other 
check to your desires than yourself? The same weakness and 
the same load of self-love which render us so feeling to sorrow 
and affliction, would render us still more so to the dangerous 
impressions of pleasures and of human prosperities. 

Thus, it is no excuse for our despondency and murmurs, to 
confess that we are weak and little calculated to support the 
strokes with which we are afflicted by God. The weakness of 
our heart proceeds only from the weakness of our faith; a 
Christian soul ought to be a valiant soul, superior, says the 
apostle, to persecution, disgrace, infirmities, and even death. 
He may be oppressed, continues the apostle, but he cannot be 
vanquished; he may be despoiled of his wealth, reputation, 
ease, and even life, but he cannot be robbed of that treasure of 
faith and of grace which he has locked up in his heart, and 
which amply consoles him for all these fleeting and frivolous 
losses. He may be brought to shed tears of sensibility and of 
sorrow, for religion does not extinguish the feelings of nature; 
but his heart immediately disavows its weakness, and turns its 
carnal tears into tears of penitence and of piety. What do I say? 
A Christian soul even delights in tribulations; he considers 
them as proofs of the tender watchfulness of God over him, as 
the precious pledge of the promises to come, as the blessed fea- 
tures of resemblance to Jesus Christ, and which give him an 
assured right to share after this life in his immortal glory. To 
be weak and rebellious against the order of God under suffer- 
ance, is to have lost faith, and to be no longer Christian. 

I confess that there are hearts more tender and more feeling 
to sorrow than others; but that sensibility is left to them only 
to increase the merit of their sufferings, and not to excuse their 
impatience and murmurings. It is not the feeling, it is the im- 
moderate use, of sorrow which the gospel condemns. In pro- 
portion as we are born feeling for our afflictions, so ought we 
to be so to the consolations of faith. The same sensibility which 
renders our heart susceptible of chagrin, should open it to grace 
which soothes and supports it. A good heart has many more 
resources against afflictions, in consequence of grace finding 
easier access to it ; immoderate grief is rather the consequence 
of passion than of the goodness of the heart; and to be unable 



200 



ON AFFLICTIONS. 



[Serm. XII. 



to submit to God, or to taste consolation in our troubles, is to 
be not tender and feeling, but untractable and desperate. 

Moreover, all the precepts of the gospel require strength, and 
if you have not enough to support with submission the crosses 
with which the Lord pleaseth to afflict you, you must equally 
want sufficient for the observance of the other duties prescribed 
to you by the doctrine of Jesus Christ. It requires strength of 
mind to forgive an injury; to speak well of those who traduce 
us; to conceal the faults of those who wish to dishonour even 
our virtues. It requires fortitude to be enabled to fly from a 
world which is agreeable to us; to tear ourselves from pleasures 
towards which we are impelled by all our inclinations; to resist 
examples authorised by the multitude, and of which custom has 
now almost established a law. Strength of mind is required to 
make a Christian use of prosperity; to be humble in exaltation, 
mortified in abundance, poor of heart amidst perishable riches, 
detached from all when possessed of all, and filled with desires 
for heaven amidst all the pleasures and felicities of the earth. 
It is required to be able to conquer ourselves; to repress a ri- 
sing desire; to stifle an agreeable feeling; to recal to order a 
heart which is incessantly straying from it. Lastly, among all 
the precepts of the gospel, there is not one which does not sup- 
pose a firm and noble soul; everywhere self-denial is required; 
everywhere the kingdom of God is a field to be brought into 
cultivation, a vineyard where toil and the heat of the day must 
be endured, a career in which continual and valiant combating 
is required; in a word, the disciples of Jesus Christ can never 
be weak without being overcome; and every thing, even to the 
smallest obligations of faith, requires exertion, and bears the 
mark of the cross, which is its ruling spirit; and if you fail but 
for an instant in fortitude you are lost. To say then that we 
are weak, is to say that the entire gospel is not made for us, 
and that we are incapable of being not only submissive and pa- 
tient, but likewise of being chaste, humble, disinterested, mor- 
tified, gentle, and charitable. 

But however weak we may be, we ought to have this confi- 
dence in the goodness of God, that we are never tried, afflicted, 
or tempted beyond our strength ; that the Lord always propor- 
tioned the afflictions to our weakness; that he dealeth out his 
chastisements like his favours, by weight and measure; that in 
striking he meaneth not to destroy, but to purify and to save 
us; that he himself aideth us to bear the crosses which he im- 
poseth; that he chastiseth us as a father, and not as a judge; 
that the same hand which strikes sustains us; that the same 
rod which makes the wound bears the oil and the honey to 
soften its pain. He knoweth the nature of our hearts, and how 
far our weakness goes; and as his intention in afflicting us is to 
sanctify and not to destro}^ us, he knoweth what degree of 
weight to give to his hand in order to diminish nothing from 



Serm. XII.] 



ON AFFLICTIONS. 



201 



our merit if too light, and, on the other side, not to loose it al- 
together, if beyond our strength. 

Ah ! What other intention could he have in shedding sorrows 
through our life? Is he a cruel God who delighteth only in the 
misery of his creatures? Is he a barbarous tyrant, who finds 
his greatness and his security only in the blood and in the tears 
of the subjects who worship him? Is he an envious and morose 
master, who can taste of no happiness while sharing it with his 
slaves? Is it necessary that we should suffer, groan, and perish 
in order to render him happy? It is on our own account alone, 
therefore, that he punisheth and chastiseth us; his tenderness 
suffers, as I may say, for our evils; but as his love is a just and 
enlightened love, he preferreth to leave us to suffer, because he 
foresees that, in terminating our pains, he would augment our 
wretchedness. He is, says a holy father, like a tender phy- 
cian, who pities, it is true, the cries and the sufferings of his 
patient, but who, in spite of his cries, cuts, even to the quick, 
the corrupted part of his wound; he is never more gentle and 
more compassionate than when he appears most severe; and af- 
flictions must indeed be useful and necessary to us, since a God 
so merciful and so good can prevail upon himself to afflict us. 

It is written, that Joseph, exalted to the first offices in Egypt, 
could hardly retain his tears, and felt his bowels yearn towards 
his brethren in the very time that he affected to speak most 
harshly to them, and that he feigned not to know them. It is 
in this manner that Jesus Christ chastiseth us. He affects, if 
it be permitted to speak in this manner, not to acknowledge in 
us his co-heirs and his brethren; he strikes and treats us harsh- 
ly as strangers ; but his love suffers for this constraint; he is 
unable long to maintain this character of severity, which is so 
foreign to him: his favours soon come to soften his blows; he 
soon shows himself such as he is; and his love never fails to 
betray these appearances of rigour and anger. Judge, then, if 
the blows which come from so kind and so friendly a hand can 
be otherwise than proportioned to our weakness. 

Let us accuse then only the corruption and not the weakness 
of our heart, for our impatience and murmurs. Have not weak 
young women formerly defied all the barbarity of tyrants? 
Have not children, before they had learned to support even the 
ordinary toils of life, run with joy to brave all the rigours of 
the most frightful death? Have not old men, already sinking 
under the weight of their own body, felt, like the eagle, their 
youth renewed amidst the torments of a long martyrdom? You 
are weak: But it is that very weakness which is glorious to 
faith and to the religion of Jesus Christ; it is even on that ac- 
count that the Lord hath chosen you to display in your instance 
how much more powerful grace is than nature. If you were 
born with more fortitude and strength, you would do less ho- 
nour to the power of grace; to man would be attributed a pa- 



202 



ON AFFLICTIONS. 



[Seem. XII. 



tience which should be a gift of God; thus the weaker you are, 
the fitter instrument you become for the designs and for the 
glory of God. When his hand hath been heavy, he hath chosen 
only the weak, that man might attribute nothing to himself, 
and to overthrow by the example of then* constancy, the vain 
fortitude of sages and of philosophers. His disciples were only 
weak lambs, when he dispersed them through the universe, and 
exposed them amidst the wolves. They rendered glory in then- 
weakness to the power of grace, and to the truth of his doctrine. 
They are those earthen vessels which the Lord taketh delight 
in breaking, like those of Gideon, to make the light and the 
power of faith shine forth in them with greater magnificence ; 
and, if you entered into the designs of his wisdom and of his 
mercy, your weakness, which in your opinion justifies your 
murmurs, would constitute the sweetest consolation of your 
sufferings. 

Lord, would you say to him, I ask not that proud reason, 
which seeks, in the glory of suffering with constancy, the whole 
consolation of its pains : I ask not from thee that insensibility 
of heart, which either feels not or contemns its misfortunes. 
Leave me, O Lord, that weak and timid reason, that tender 
and feeling heart, which seems so little fitted to sustain its tri- 
bulations and sufferings; only increase thy consolations and 
favours. The more I shall appear weak in the sight of men, 
the greater wilt thou appear in my weakness; the more shall 
the children of the age admire the power of faith, which alone 
can exalt the weakest and most timid souls to that point of 
constancy and firmness to which all philosophy hath never been 
able to attain. First pretext, taken in the weakness of man 
confuted: We have now to expose the illusion of the second, 
which is founded on the excess, or the nature of the afflictions 
themselves. 

Part II. Nothing is more usual with persons afflicted by 
God, than to justify their complaints and their murmurs by 
the excess, or the nature of their afflictions. We always wish 
our crosses to have no resemblance to those of others; and, lest 
the example of their fortitude and of their faith condemn us, 
we seek out differences in our grievances, in order to justify 
that of our dispositions and of our conduct. . We persuade 
ourselves that we could bear with resignation crosses of any 
other description; but that those with which we are overwhelm- 
ed by the Lord, are of such a nature as to preclude consolation : 
that the more we examine the lot of others, the more do we 
find our own misfortunes singular, and our situation unex- 
ampled; and that it is impossible to preserve patience and se- 
renity in a state where chance seems to have collected, solely 
for us, a thousand afflicting circumstances,, which never before 
had happened to others. 



Serm. XII.] ON AFFLICTIONS. 



203 



But, to take from self-love a defence so weak and so unworthy 
of faith, I would have only fortitude to answer you, that the 
more extraordinary our afflictions appear, the less ought we to 
believe them the effects of chance ; the more evidently ought we 
to see in them the secret and inscrutable arrangements of a 
God singularly watchful over our destiny; the more should we 
presume that, under events so new, he doubtless concealeth new 
views, and singular designs of mercy upon our soul; the more 
should we say to ourselves, that he consequently meaneth us 
not to perish with the multitude, which is the party of the 
reprobate, seeing that he leadeth us by ways so uncommon 
and so little trodden. This singularity of misfortunes ought, 
in the eyes of our faith, to be a soothing distinction; he hath 
always conducted his chosen, in matters of affliction as well 
as in other things, by new and extraordinary ways. What 
melancholy and surprising adventures in the life of a Noah, 
a Lot, a Joseph, a Moses, and a Job? Trace, from age to 
age, the history of the just, .and you will always find in their 
various vicissitudes, something, I know not what, of singular 
and incredible, which has staggered even the belief of the sub- 
sequent ages. Thus, the less your afflictions resemble those of 
others, the more should you consider them as the afflictions of 
God's chosen: they are stamped with the mark of the just: 
they enter into that tradition of singular calamities which, from 
the beginning of ages, forms their history. Battles lost, when 
victory seemed certain; cities looked upon as impregnable, fallen 
at the sole approach of the enemy; a kingdom, once the most 
flourishing in Europe, stricken with every evil which the Lord 
in his wrath can pom* out upon the people; the court filled with 
mourning; and all the royal race almost extinct; such, Sire, is 
what the Lord in his mercy reserved for your piety; and such 
are the unprecedented misfortunes which he prepared for you, 
to purify the prosperities of a reign the most brilliant in our 
annals. The singularity of the unfortunate events with which 
God afflicted you, is intended for the sole purpose of rendering 
you equally pious as a Christian, as you have been great as a 
King. It would seem, that every thing was to be singular in 
your reign; the prosperities as the misfortunes; in order that, 
after your glory before men, nothing should be wanting to your 
piety before God. It is a striking example, prepared by his 
goodness for our age. 

And behold, my dear hearer, a striking instance, both to in- 
struct and to confute you, when you complain of the excess of 
your misfortunes and of your siifferings. The more God afflict- 
ed, the greater is his love and his watchfulness over you. More 
common misfortunes might have appeared to you as the conse- 
quences merely of natural causes: and though all events are 
conducted by the secret springs of his providence, you might 
perhaps have had room to suppose that the Lord had no par- 



204 



ON AFFLICTIONS. [Serm. XII. 



ticular designs upon yon, in providing for you only certain 
afflictions which happen every day to the rest of men. But, in 
the grievous and singular situation in which he placeth you, you 
can no longer hide from yourself, that his regards are fixed on 
you alone, and that you are the special object of his merciful 
designs. 

Now, what more consoling in our sufferings! God seeth you; 
he numbereth my sighs; he weigheth mine afflictions; he be- 
holdeth my tears to flow; he maketh them subservient to mine 
eternal sanctification. Since his hand hath weighed so heavily, 
and in so singular a way, upon me, and since no earthly resource 
seems now to be left me, I consider myself as having at last 
become an object more worthy of his cares and of his regards. 
Ah ! If I still enjoyed a serene and happy situation, his looks 
would no longer be upon me; he would neglect me; and I should 
be blended before him with so many others who are the pros- 
perous of the earth. Beloved sufferings, which, in depriving 
me of all human aids, restore me to my God, and render him 
mine only resource in all my sorrows! Precious afflictions, 
which, in turning me aside from all creatures, are the cause 
that I now become the continual object of the remembrance and 
of the mercies of my Lord! 

I might reply to you, in the second place, that common and 
momentary afflictions would have aroused our faith but for an 
instant. We would soon have found, in every thing around us, 
a thousand resources to obliterate the remembrance of that 
slight misfortune. Pleasures, human consolations, the new 
events which the world is continually offering to our sight, 
would soon have beguiled our sorrow, and restored our relish 
for the world and for its vain amusements; and our hearts, al- 
ways in concert with all the objects which flatter it, would soon 
have been tired of its sighs and of its sorrows. But the Lord, 
in sending afflictions in which religion alone can become our re- 
source, hath meant to preclude all return towards the world, 
and tor place betwixt our weakness and us a barrier which can 
never be shaken by either time or accidents; he hath anticipa- 
ted our inconstancy, in rendering precautions necessary to us, 
which might not perhaps have always appeared equally useful. 
He read, in the character of our heart, that our fidelity in flying 
the dangers of, and separating ourselves from the world, would 
not extend beyond our sorrow; that the same moment which 
beheld us consoled would witness our change; that, in forget- 
ting our chagrins, we would soon have forgotten our pious reso- 
lutions; and that short-lived afflictions would have made us only 
short-lived righteous. He hath therefore established the con- 
tinuance of our piety upon that of our sufferings; he hath lodged 
fixed and constant afflictions, as sureties for the constancy of our 
faith : and lest, in leaving our soul in om- own power, we should 
again restore it to the world, he hath resolved to render it safe, 



Seem. XII.] ON AFFLICTIONS. 



205 



by attaching it for ever to the foot of the cross. We are 
thoroughly sensible ourselves that a great blow was required 
to rouse us from our lethargy; that we had been little benefited 
by the slight afflictions with which the Lord hath hitherto been 
pleased to visit us; and that scarcely had he stricken us, when 
we had forgotten the hand that had inflicted so salutary a 
wound. Of what, then, O my God, should I complain? That 
excess which I find in my troubles, is an excess of thy mercies. 
I do not consider that the less thou sparest the patient, the 
more thou hastenest his cure, and that all the utility and all 
the security of our sufferings consist in the rigour of thy blows. 
My sweetest consolation in the afflicting state in which thy pro- 
vidence, O Lord, hath been pleased to place me, shall then be, 
in future, to reflect that at least thou sparest me not; that thou 
measurest thy rigours and thy remedies upon my wants, and 
not upon my desires; and that thou hast more regard to the 
security of my salvation than to the injustice of my complaints. 

I might still reply to you: Enter into judgment with the 
Lord, you who complain of the excess of your sufferings; place 
in a balance, on the one side your crimes, and on the other your 
afflictions; measure the rigour of his chastisements upon the 
enormity of your offences; compare that which you suffer with 
that which you ought to suffer; see if your afflictions go the 
same length as your senseless pleasures have done; if the keen- 
ness and the continuance of your sorrows correspond with those 
of your profane debaucheries; if the state of restraint in which 
you live equals the licentiousness and the depravity of your former 
manners; and should your afflictions be found to overbalance your 
iniquities, then boldly reproach the Lord for his injustice. You 
judge of your sufferings by your inclinations, but judge of them 
by your crimes. What ! not a single moment of your worldly 
life but what has perhaps made you deserving of an eternal 
misery, and you murmur against the goodness of a God who 
commuteth these everlasting torments, so often merited* into 
a few rapid and momentary afflictions, and even against which 
the consolations of faith hold out so many resources ! 

What injustice ! what ingratitude ! Ah ! have a care, unfaith- 
ful soul, lest the Lord listen to thee in his wrath; have a care 
lest he punish thy passions, by providing for thee, here below, 
whatever is favourable to them; lest thou be not found worthy in 
his sight of these temporal afflictions; lest he reserve thee for the 
time of his justice and of his vengeance, and that he treat thee 
like those unfortunate victims who are ornamented with flowers, 
who are nursed and fattened with so much care, only because 
they are destined for the sacrifice, and that the knife which is 
to stab, and the pile which is to consume them, are in readiness 
upon the altar. He is terrible in his gifts as in his wrath; 
and seeing that guilt must be punished either with fleeting pun- 
ishments here below, or with eternal pains after this life, no- 



206 



ON AFFLICTIONS. [Serm. XII. 



thing ought to appear more fearful in the eyes of faith than to 
be a sinner and yet prosperous on the earth. 

Great God! let it he here then for me the time of thy ven- 
geance; and since my crimes cannot go unpunished, hasten, O 
Lord, to satisfy thy justice. The more I am spared here, the 
more shalt thou appear to me as a terrible God, who refuseth to 
let me go for some fleeting afflictions, and whose wrath can be 
appeased by nothing but mine eternal 'misery. Lend not thine 
ear to the cries of my grief, nor to the lamentations of a cor- 
rupted heart, which knows not its true interests. I disown, 
Lord, these too human sighs which the sadness of my state still 
continually forces from me; these carnal tears which affliction 
so often maketh me to shed in thy presence. Listen not to the 
intreaties which I have hitherto made to obtain an end to my 
sufferings; complete rather thy vengeance upon me here below; 
reserve nothing for that dreadful eternity, where thy chastise- 
ment shall be without end and without measure. I ask thee 
only to sustain my weakness; and, in shedding sorrows through 
my life, shed likewise upon it thy grace, which consoles and re- 
compenses with such usury an afflicted heart. 

To all these truths, so consoling for an afflicted soul, I might 
still add, that our sufferings appear excessive only through the 
excess of the corruption of our heart; that the keenness of our 
afflictions springs solely from that of our passions; that it is the 
impropriety of out* attachments to the objects lost, which renders 
their loss so grievous; that we are keenly afflicted only when 
we had been keenly attached: and that the excess of our afflic- 
tions is always the punishment of the excess of our iniquitous 
loves. I might add, that we always magnify whatever regards 
ourselves; that the very idea of singularity in our misfortunes 
flatters our vanity, at the same time that it authorises our mur- 
murs; that we never wish to resemble others; that we feel a 
secret pleasure in persuading ourselves that we are single of our 
kind; we wish all the world to be occupied with our misfor- 
tunes alone, as if we were the only unfortunate of the earth. 
Yes, my brethren, the evils of others are nothing in our eyes : 
we see not that all around us are, perhaps, more unhappy than 
we; that we have a thousand resources in our afflictions, which 
are denied to others; that we derive a thousand consolations in 
our infirmities, from wealth, and the number of persons watch- 
ful over our smallest wants; that, in the loss of a person dear 
to us, a thousand means of softening its bitterness still remain 
from the situation in which Providence hath placed us; that, 
in domestic divisions, we find comforts in the tenderness and in 
the confidence of our friends, which we had been unable to pro- 
cure among our relatives; lastly, that we find a thousand human 
indemnifications to our misfortunes, and that, were we to place 
in a balance, on the one side our consolations, and on the other 
our sufferings, we should find, that there are still remaining in 



Serm. XII.] 



ON AFFLICTIONS. 



207 



our state more comforts capable of corrupting us, than crosses 
calculated to sanctify us. 

Thus, it is almost solely the great and the prosperous of the 
world who complain of the excess of their misfortunes and suf- 
ferings. The unfortunate majority of the earth, who are born 
to, and live in penury and distress, pass in silence, and almost 
in the neglect of their sufferings, their wretched days: the small- 
est gleam of comfort and ease restores serenity and cheerful- 
ness to their heart: the slightest consolations obliterate their 
troubles : a moment of pleasure makes up for a whole year of 
sufferance; while those fortunate and sensual souls, amidst all 
their abundance, are seen to reckon, as an unheard-of misfor- 
tune, the disappointment of a single desire : We view them turn- 
ing into a martyrdom for themselves, the weariness and even the 
satiety of pleasures; drawing from imaginary evils the source of 
a thousand real vexations; feeling tenfold more anguish for the 
failure of a single acquisition, than pleasure in the possession of 
all they enjoy; in a word, considering, as the greatest of mis- 
fortunes, the least interruption, however trifling, to their sensual 
happiness. 

Yes, my brethren, it is the great and powerful alone who com- 
plain; who continually imagine themselves the only unhappy; 
who never have enough of comforters; who, on the slightest re- 
verse, see assembled around them, not only those worldly friends 
whom their rank and fortune procure, but likewise all the pious 
and enlightened ministers of the gospel, distinguished by the 
public esteem, and whose holy instructions would, in general, 
be much better bestowed on so many other unfortunate individuals 
who are destitute of every worldly resource and religious assis- 
tance, and to whoni they would likewise be so much more bene- 
ficial. But, before the tribunal of Jesus Christ, your afflictions 
shall be weighed with those of so many of your unfortunate 
fellow-creatures, and whose misfortunes are so much the more 
dreadful as they are more hidden and more neglected. It will 
then be demanded at you, if it belonged to you to complain and 
to murmur: it will be demanded if you were entitled to lay 
such stress upon calamities which would have been conso- 
lations to so many others: if it was your business to murmur so 
highly against a God, who treated you with such indulgence, 
while his hand was so heavy on such an infinity of unhappy 
fellow-creatures; if they had less right to the riches, and to the 
pleasures of the earth, than you: if their soul was no less noble, 
and less precious before God than yours; in a word, if they 
were either more criminal, or of another nature than you? 

Alas ! It is not only our own self-love, but it is likewise our 
hardness towards our brethren, which magnifies to us our own 
misfortunes. Let us enter those poor unprovided dwellings, 
where shame conceals such bitter and affecting poverty; let us 



208 ON AFFLICTIONS. [Serm. XII. 



view those asylums of public compassion where every calamity 
seems to reign: it is there that we shall learn to appreciate our 
own afflictions: it is there that, touched to the heart with the 
excess of so many evil*, we shall blush to give even a name to 
the slightness of ours: it is there that our murmurs agaiust Hea- 
ven shall be changed into thanksgivings, and that, less taken up 
with the slight crosses sent us by the Lord, than with so many 
others from which he spareth us, we shall begin to dread his in- 
dulgence, far from complaiuing of his severity. My God! how 
awful shall be the judgment of the great and the mighty, since, 
besides the inevitable abuse of their prosperity, the afflictions, 
which ought to have sanctified its use, and expiated its abuses, 
shall become themselves their greatest crimes! 

But how employ afflictions in santifying the dangers of their 
station, or in working out salvation, since they seem to cast 
such invincible obstacles in thmr way? This is the last pretext 
drawn froni the incompatability which afflictions seem to have 
with our salvation. 

Part III. It is very surprising, that the corruption of the 
human heart finds, even in sufferances, obstacles to salvation, 
and that Christians continually justify their murmurs against 
the wisdom and the goodness of God, by accusing him of sending 
crosses incompatible with then* eternal salvation. Nothing is 
more common, however, in the world, than this iniquitous lan- 
guage; and when we exhort the souls afflicted by God to con- 
vert these fleeting afflictions into the price of heaven and of 
eternity, they reply, that, in this state of distress, they are in- 
capable of every thing; that the obstacles and vexations which 
they are continually encountering, far from recalling them to 
order and to duty, serve only to irritate the mind, and to harden 
the heart; and that tranquillity must be restored before they can 
turn then* thoughts towards God. 

Now, I say, that, of all the pretexts employed in justification 
of the unchristian use made of afflictions, this is the most absurd 
and the most culpable. The most culpable, for it is blasphem- 
ing Providence to pretend, that it places you in situations incom- 
patible with your salvation. "Whatever it doth or permitteth 
here below, it only doth or pennitteth in order to facilitate to 
men the ways of eternal life : every event, prosperous or unpros- 
perous, in the measure of our lot, is meant by it as a mean of 
salvation, and of sanctification; all its designs upon us tend to 
that sole purpose; whatever we are, even in the order of nature, 
our birth, our fortune, our talents, our age, our dignities, our 
protectors, our subjects, our masters! all this, in its views of 
mercy upon us, enters into the impenetrable designs of our eter- 
nal sanctification. All this visible world itself is made only for 
the age to come; whatever passeth, hath its secret connexions 
with that eternal age, where things shall pass no more; what- 



Serai. XIL] 



ON AFFLICTIONS. 



209 



ever we see, is only the image and trust of the invisible things. 
The world is worthy of the cares of a wise and a merciful God, 
only inasmuch as, by secret and adorable relations, its divers 
revolutions are to form that heavenly church, that immortal as- 
sembly of chosen, where he shall for ever be glorified. To pre- 
tend, then, that he placed us in situations, which not only have 
no relation to, but are even incompatible with our eternal inter- 
ests, is to make a temporal God of him, and to blaspheme his 
adorable wisdom. 

But, not only nothing is more culpable than this pretext; I 
say, likewise, that nothing is more foolish: for, it is only by de- 
taching itself from this miserable world, that a soul returns to 
God; and nothing, says St Augustin, so effectually detaches 
from this miserable world, as when the Lord sheddeth salutary 
sorrows over its dangerous pleasures. " Lord," said a holy 
long of Judah, " I had neglected thee in prosperity and in a- 
bundance; the pleasures of royalty? and the splendour of a long 
and glorious reign, had corrupted my heart : the flatteries and 
the deceitful words of the wicked had lulled me into a profound 
and a fatal sleep; but thine hand had been upon me, in pour- 
ing out upon my people all the scourges of thy wrath, in raising 
up against me mine own children and subjects, whom I had load- 
ed with favours; and I awoke: thou hast humbled me, and I 
have had recourse to thee; thou hast afflicted me, and I have 
sought thee, and I have found out that I ought not to have my 
trust in men; that prosperity is a dream; glory a mistake; the 
talents which men admire, vices concealed under the "brilliant 
outsides of human virtues; the whole world a deception, which 
feeds us with only vain phantoms, and leaves nothing solid in 
the heart; and that thou alone art worthy to be served, for thou 
alone forsakest not those who serve thee." 

Behold the most natural effect of afflictions; they facilitate all 
the duties of religion; hatred of the world in rendering it more 
disagreeable to us; indifference towards all creatures, by giving us 
experience, either of their perfidy by infidelities, or of their frailty 
by unexpected losses; privation of pleasures, by placing obstacles 
in their way; the desire of eternal riches, and consoling returns 
towards God, by leaving us almost no consolation among men; 
lastly, all the obligations of faith become more easy to the afflic- 
ted soul; his good desires find fewer obstacles, his weakness 
fewer rocks, his faith more aids, his lukewarmness more re- 
sources, his passions more checks, and even his virtue more meri- 
torious opportunities. 

Thus the church was never more fervent and purer than when 
she was afflicted; the ages of her sufferings and persecutions 
were the ages of her splendour and of her zeal. Tranquillity 
afterwards corrupted her manners; her days became less pure 
and less innocent as soon as they became more fortunate and 
powerful; her glory ended almost with her misfortunes; and 



210 



ON AFFLICTIONS. [Serm. XII. 



her peace, as the prophet said, was more bitter, through the 
licentiousness of her children, than even her troubles had ever 
been through the barbarity of her enemies. 

Even you who complain that the crosses with which the Lord 
afflicteth you discourage you, and check any desire of labouring 
towards your salvation; you well know that better days have 
not been for you more holy and more faithful; you well know 
that then, intoxicated with the world and its pleasures, you lived 
in a total neglect of your God, and that the comforts of your 
situation were only the spurs of your corruption, and the in- 
struments of your iniquitous desires. 

But such is the perpetual illusion of your self-love. When 
fortunate, when every thing answers to our wishes, and the 
world smiles upon us, when we allege the dangers of our state 
to justify the errors of our worldly manners : we say that it is 
very difficult, at a certain age and in a certain situation, when 
a rank is to be supported, and appearances to be kept up with 
the world, to condemn ourselves to solitude, to prayer, to flight 
from pleasures, and to all the duties of a gloomy and a Christian 
life. But on the other side, when under affliction; when the 
body is struck with lassitude, and fortune forsakes us; when our 
friends deceive, and our masters neglect us; when our enemies 
overpower, and our relations become our persecutors; we com- 
plain that every thing estranges us from God in ;this state of 
bitterness and sorrow; that the mind is not sufficiently tranquil 
to devote any thoughts to salvation; that the heart is too exas- 
perated to feel any thing but its own misfortunes; that amuse- 
ments and pleasures, now become necessary, must be sought to 
lull its grief, and to prevent the total loss of reason^ in giving 
way to all the horrors of a profound melancholy. It is thus, O 
my God! that by our eternal contradictions we justify the 
adorable ways of thy wisdom upon the lots of men, and that 
we provide for thy justice powerful reasons to overthrow one 
day the illusion and the falsity of our pretexts. 

For, besides, be our sufferings what they may, the history of 
religion holds out righteous characters to our example, who, in 
the same situation as we are, have held their soul in patience, 
and turned their afflictions into a resource of salvation. Do you 
weep the loss of a person dear to your heart? Judith in a simi- 
lar affliction found the increase of her piety and faith, and chan- 
ged the tears of her widowhood into those of retirement and peni- 
tence. If a pining health render life more gloomy and bitter than 
even death itself, Job found in the wrecks of an ulcerated body, 
motives of compunction, longings for eternity, and the hopes of 
an immortal resurrection. If your character in the world be 
stained by calumnies, Susanna held out an unshaken soul under 
the blackest aspersions; and knowing that she had the Lord in 
testimony of her innocence, she left to him the care of avenging 
her upon the injustice of men. If your fortune be the victim 



Serm. XII. j ON AFFLICTIONS. 



211 



of treachery, David, dethroned, considered the humiliation of his 
new state as the just punishment of the abuse he had made of 
his past prosperity. If an unfortunate union become your daily 
cross, Esther found, in the caprices and frenzies of a faithless 
husband, the proof of her virtue, and the merit of her meekness 
and patience. In a word, place yourself in the most dismal 
situations, and you will find righteous men, who have wrought 
out their salvation, in the same; and, without applying to former 
ages for examples, look around, (the hand of the Lord is not 
yet shortened), and you will see souls, who, loaded with the 
same crosses as you, make a very different use of them, and 
find means of salvation in the very same events where you find 
only a rock to your innocence or a pretext for your murmurs. 
What do I say? you will see souls whom the mercy of God 
hath recalled from their errors, by pouring out salutary sorrows 
upon their life; by overturning an established fortune; by chill- 
ing an envied favour; by sapping a health apparently unalter- 
able; by terminating a profane connexion through a glaring in- 
constancy. You yourself, then, a witness of their change and 
of their conversion, have lessened the merit of it, from the fa- 
cilities provided by chagrin and afflictions ; you have placed little 
confidence in a virtue which misfortunes had rendered as if ne- 
cessary; you have said that it required little exertion to forsake 
a world which was become tired of us; that at the first gleam 
of good fortune pleasures would soon be seen to succeed to all 
this great show of devotion, and that they had devoted them- 
selves to God only, because they had nothing better to do. Un- 
just that you are ! and at present, when there is question of re- 
turning to him in your affliction, you say that it is not possible; 
that a heart pressed and bowed down with sorrow is incapable 
of paying attention to any thing but its grief, and that we are 
more hardened than touched in this state of distress and mis- 
fortune; and after having censured and cast a stain upon the 
piety of afflicted souls, as a measure too easy, and to which little 
merit is attached, as it required almost no exertion, you excuse 
yourself from adopting it in your affliction, and from making a 
Christian use of it, because you pretend that it is not possible 
in it to pay attention to any thing but to your sorrow. Answer, 
or rather tremble, lest you find the rock of your salvation in a 
situation which ought to be its surest resource. After having 
abused prosperity, tremble lest you now make your misfortunes 
the fatal instruments of your destruction, and lest you shut 
upon yourself all the ways of goodness which God might open 
to you in order to recal you to him. 

When, O my God! will the time come that my soul, exalt- 
ing itself through faith above all creatures, shall no longer wor- 
ship but thee in them; shall no longer attribute events to them 
of which thou alone art the author; shall recognize, in the di- 
vers situations in which thou placest it, the adorable arrange- 



212 



ON AFFLICTIONS. [Serm. XIL 



ments of thy providence; and, even amid all its crosses, shall 
taste that unalterable peace which the world with all its pleasures 
can never bestow? 

How melancholy, in effect, my brethren, when visited and 
afflicted of God, to seek for consolation in rising up against the 
hand which strikes us: in murmuring against his justice; in 
casting ourselves off from him, as it were in a frenzy of rage, 
despair and revenge, and to seek consolation in our own madness ! 
What a horrible situation is that of a foolish soul whom God 
afflicteth, and who for consolation flies in the face of his God; 
seeks to ease his troubles, in multiplying his trespasses; yields 
himself up to debauchery, in order to drown his sorrows; and 
makes the overwhelming sadness of guilt a horrible recourse 
against the sadness of his afflictions ! 

No, my brethren, religion alone can truly console us in our 
misfortunes. Philosophy checked complaints, but it did not soft- 
en the anguish. The world lulls cares, but it does not cure 
them: and, amidst all its senseless pleasures, the secret sting of 
sadness always remains buried in the heart. God alone can 
comfort our afflictions; and is another necessary to a faithfull 
soul? Weak creatures ! You may easily, by vain speeches, and 
by that customary language of compassion and tenderness, make 
yourselves to be understood by the ears of the body ; but there 
is none but the God of all consolation who can speak to the heart: 
in the excess of my pains, I have vainly sought consolation 
among ye: I have sharpened my sufferings, while thinking to 
soften them, and thy vain consolations have been to me only 
fresh sorrows. 

Great God! It is at thy feet, that I mean henceforth to pour 
out all the bitterness of mine heart: it is with thee alone, that 
I mean to forget all my grievances, all my sufferings, all crea- 
tures. Hitherto I have given way to chagrins and to sadness 
altogether human; a thousand times have I wished that my wis- 
dom were regulated by the mad projects of my heart; thy 
thoughts have wandered; my mind hath formed a thousand de- 
lusive dreams; my heart hath pursued these vain phantoms: I 
have longed for a higher birth, more fortune, talents, fame, and 
health: I have lulled myself in these ideas of anjunaginary happi- 
ness. Fool that I am ! As if I was capable of altering at my 
pleasure the immutable order of thy Providence ! As if I had 
been wiser or more enlightened than thee, O my God, upon my 
true interests ! I have never entered into thine eternal designs 
upon me: I have never considered the sorrows of my situation 
as entering into the order of mine eternal destination; and, even 
to this day, my joys and my sorrows have depended upon the 
created alone: consequently my joys have never been tranquil, 
and my sorrows have always been without resource. But hence- 
forth, O my God! thou shalt be mine only comforter: and I will 
seek, in the meditation of thy holy law, and in my submission 



Serm. XIII.] ON PRAYER. 



213 



to thine eternal decrees, those solid consolations which I have 
never found in the world, and which, in softening our afflictions 
here below, secure to us, at the same time, their immortal re- 
ward hereafter. 



SERMON XIII. 
ON PRAYER. 

Matth. xv. 22. 
Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David. 

Such is the lamentation of a soul touched with its wretchedness, 
and which addresses itself to the sovereign Physician, in whose 
compassion alone it hopes to find relief. This was formerly the 
prayer of a woman of Canaan, who wished to obtain from the 
Son of David the recovery of her daughter. Persuaded of his 
power, and expecting every thing from his usual goodness to the 
unfortunate, she knew no surer way of rendering him propi- 
tious, than the cry of her affliction, and the simple tale of her 
misfortune. And this is the model which the church now pro- 
poses to us, in order to animate and to instruct us how to pray; 
that is to say, in order to render more pleasing, and more fami- 
liar to us, this most essential duty of Christian piety. 

For, my brethren, to pray is the condition of man; it is the 
first duty of man; it is the sole resource of man; it is the whole 
consolation of man; and, to speak in the language of the Holy 
Spirit, it is the whole man. 

Yes, if the entire world, in the midst of which we live, be but 
one continued temptation; if all the situations in which we may 
be, and all the objects which environ us, seem united with our 
corruption, for the purpose of either weakening or seducing us; 
if riches corrupt, and poverty exasperate; if prosperity exalt, 
and affliction depress; if business prey upon, and ease render 
effeminate; if the sciences inflate, and ignorance lead us into 
error; if mutual intercourse trivially engage us too much, and 
solitude leave us too much to ourselves; if pleasure seduce, and 
pious works excite our pride; if health arouse the passions, and 
sickness nourish either lukewarmness or murmurings; in a 
word, if, since the fall of nature, every thing in, or around us, 
be a fresh danger to be dreaded; in a situation so deplorable, 
what hope of salvation, O my God! could there be still remain- 
ing to man, if, from the bottom of his wretchedness, he had it not 



214 



ON PRAYER. 



[Serm. XIII. 



in his power to make his lamentations to be continually mount- 
ing towards the throne of thy mercy, in order to prevail that 
thou thyself may come to his aid; that thou may interfere 
to put a check upon his passions, to clear up his errors, to sus- 
tain his weakness, to lessen his temptations, to abridge his hours 
of trials, and to save him from his backslidings ? 

The Christian is therefore a man of prayer; his origin, his 
situation, his nature, his wants, his place of abode, all inform 
him that prayer is necessary. The church herself, in which he 
is incorporated through the grace of regeneration, a stranger 
here below, is always plaintive and full of lamentation ; she re- 
cognizes her children only through their sighs, which the) r direct 
towards their country; and the Christian who does not pray, 
cuts himself off from the assembly of the holy, and is worse 
than an unbeliever. 

How comes it then, my brethren, that a duty not only so es- 
sential, but even so consoling fcr man, is at present so much 
neglected? How comes it that it is considered either as a gloomy 
and tiresome duty, or as appropriated solely for retired souls; 
insomuch, that our instructions upon prayer scarcely interest 
those who listen to us, who seem as if persuaded that they are 
more adapted to the cloister than to the court? 

Whence comes this abuse, and this universal neglect in the 
world of prayer? From two pretexts, which I now mean to 
overthrow: 1st. They do not pray, because they know not, say 
they, how to pray; and, consequently, that it is lost time: 2dly. 
They do not pray, because they complain that they find nothing 
in prayer but wanderings of the mind, which render it both in- 
sipid and disagreeable. First pretext, drawn from their igno- 
rance of the manner in which they ought to pray. Second pre- 
text, founded on the disgusts and the difficulties of prayer. 
You must be taught, therefore, how to pray, since you know it 
not. And, 2dly. the habit of prayer must be rendered easy to 
you, since you find it so troublesome and difficult. 

Part I. " The commandments which I command you," said 
formerly the Lord to his people, M are neither above your strength 
nor the reach of your mind: they are not hidden from you, nor 
far off, that you should say, who shall go up for us to Heaven 
and bring them unto us, that we may hear them and do them? 
Nor are they beyond the sea, that you should say? who shall go 
over the sea for us and bring them unto us, that we may hear 
them and do them? But the word is very nigh unto you, in 
your mouth, and in your heart, that you may do it." 

Now, what the Lord said in general of all the precepts of the 
law, that we have no occasion to seek beyond ourselves for the 
knowledge of them, but that they may be all accomplished in 
our heart and in our mouth, may more particularly be said of 



Serm. XIIL] 



ON PRAYER. 



215 



the precept of prayer, which is, as if the first and the most 
essential of all. 

Nevertheless, what they commonly oppose in the world 
against this duty is, that, when they come to prayer, they know 
not what to say to God, and that praying is a secret of which 
they have never as yet been able to comprehend any thing. I 
say, then, that the source of this pretext springs from three 
iniquitous dispositions: the first is, that they are mistaken in 
the idea which they form of prayer; the second is, that they are 
not sufficiently sensible of their own wretchedness and wants; 
and the third is, that they do not love their God. 

1st. I say that they are mistaken in the idea which they form 
of prayer. In effect, prayer is not an exertion of the mind, an 
arrangement of ideas, a profound knowledge of the mysteries 
and counsels of God; it is a simple emotion of the heart; it is 
a lamentation of the soul, deeply affected at the sight of its own 
wretchedness; it is a keen and inward feeling of our wants and 
of our weakness, and a humble confidence which it lays be- 
fore its Lord, in order to obtain relief and deliverance from 
them. Prayer supposes, in the soul which prays, neither great 
lights, uncommon knowledge, nor a mind more cultivated and 
exalted than that of the rest of men; it supposes only more 
faith, more contrition, and a warmer desire of deliverance from 
its temptations and from its wretchedness. Prayer is neither a 
secret nor a science which we learn from men; nor is it an 
art, or a private method, upon which it is necessary to consult 
skilful teachers, in order to be master of its rules and precepts. 
The methods and the maxims thereupon, pretended to be laid 
down to us in our days, are either singular ways which are not 
to be followed, or the vain speculations of an idle mind, or a 
fanaticism which may stop at nothing, and which, far from 
edifying the church, hath merited her censures, and hath fur- 
nished, to the impious, matter of derision against her, and to 
the world fresh pretexts of contempt for, and disgust at prayer. 
Prayer is a duty upon which we are all born instructed: the 
rules of this divine science are written solely in our hearts; and 
the Spirit of God is the sole master to teach it. 

A holy and innocent soul, who is penetrated with the great- 
ness of God, struck with the terror of his judgments, touched 
with his infinite mercies, who only knows to humble himself 
before him, to acknowledge, in the simplicity of his heart, his 
goodness and wonders, to adore the orders of his providence 
upon him, to accept before him of the crosses and afflictions 
imposed upon him by the wisdom of his councils; who knows 
no prayer more sublime than to be sensible before God of all 
the corruption of his heart; to groan over his own hardness of 
heart and opposition to all good; to intreat of him, with a fer- 
vent faith, to change him, to destroy in him that man of sin, 
which, in spite of his firmest resolves, continually forces him 



216 



ON PRAYER. 



[Seem. XIII. 



to make so many false steps in the ways of God: a soul of 
this description is a thousand times more instructed in the 
knowledge of prayer than all the teachers themselves, and may 
say with the prophet, " I have more understanding than all my 
" teachers." He speaks to his God as a friend to a friend; lie 
is sorry for having offended him? he upbraids himself for not 
having, as yet, sufficient force to renounce all to please him; 
he takes no pride in the sublimity of his thoughts; he leaves his 
heart to speak, and gives way to all its tenderness before the 
only object of his love. Even when his mind wanders, his 
heart watches and speaks for him; his very disgusts become a 
prayer, through the feelings which are then excited in his 
heart; he is tenderly affected, he sighs, he is displeased with, 
and a burden to himself; he feels the weight of his bonds, he 
exerts himself as if to break and to throw them off; he a thou- 
sand times renews his protestations of fidelity; he blushes and 
is ashamed at always promising, and yet being continually 
faithless: such is the whole secret, and the whole science of 
prayer. And what is there in all this beyond the reach of every 
believing soul? 

Who had instructed our poor woman of Canaan in prayer? 
A stranger, and daughter of Tyre and Sidon, who was un- 
acquainted with the wonders of the law and the oracles of the 
prophets; who had not yet heard from the mouth of the Sa- 
viour the words of eternal life; who was still under the shadows 
of ignorance and of death: she prays, however; her love, her 
confidence, the desire of being granted, teach her to pray; her 
heart being touched, constitutes the whole merit and the whole 
sublimity of her prayer. 

And surely, if, in order to pray, it were requisite to rise to 
those sublime states of prayer to which God exalteth some holy 
souls; if it were necessary to be wrapt in ecstasy, and transport- 
ed even up to heaven, like Paul, there to hear those ineffable 
Secrets which God exposeth not to man, and which it is not 
permitted, even to man himself, to reveal; or, like Moses upon 
the holy mountain, to be placed upon a cloud of glory, and 
face to face, to see God; that is to say, if it were necessary to 
have attained to that degree of intimate union with the Lord, 
in which the soul, as if already freed from its body, springs up 
even into the bosom of its God; contemplates at leisure his in- 
finite perfections; forgets, as I may say, its members which are 
still upon the earth; is no longer disturbed, nor even diverted 
by the phantoms of the senses; is fixed, and as if absorbed in 
the contemplation of the wonders and the grandeur of God; 
and, already participating in his eternity, could count a whole 
age passed in that blessed state, as only a short and rapid mo- 
ment; if, I say, it were necessary, in order to pray, to be fa- 
voured with these rare and excellent gifts of the Holy Spirit, 
you might tell us, like those new believers of whom St. Paul 



Serm. XIII.] 



ON PRAYERo 



makes mention, that you have not yet received them, and 
that you know not what, is even, that Spiiit which communicates 
them. 

But prayer is not a special gift set apart for privileged souls 
alone; it is a common duty imposed upon every believer; it is 
not solely a virtue of perfection, and reserved for certain purer 
and more holy souls; it is, like charity, an indispensable vir- 
tue, requisite to the perfect as to the imperfect, within the 
capacity of the illiterate equally as of the learned, commanded 
to the simple as to the most enlightened; it is. the virtue of all 
men; it is the science of every believer; it is the perfection of 
every creature. Whoever has a heart, and is capable of loving 
the Author of his being; whoever has a reason capable of know- 
ing the nothingness of the creature and the greatness of God, 
must know how to adore, to return him thanks, and to have 
recource to him; to appease him when offended; to call upon 
him when turned away; to thank him when favourable; to 
humble himself when he strikes; to lay his wants before him, or 
to intreat his countenance and protection. 

Thus, when the disciples ask of Jesus Christ to teach them 
to pray, he doth not unfold to them the height, the sublimity, 
the depth of the mystery of God;, he solely informs them, 
that, in order to pray, it is necessary to consider God as a 
tender, bountiful, ancl careful father; to address themselves to 
him with a respectful familiarity, and with a confidence blend- 
ed with fear and love; to speak to him the language of our 
weakness and of our wretchedness; to borrow no expressions 
but from our heart; to make no attempt of rising to him, but 
rather to draw him nearer to us; to lay our wants before him, 
and to implore his aid; to wish that all men bless and worship 
him; that his reign be established in all hearts; that his will 
be done, as in heaven so in earth; that sinners return to the 
paths of righteousness; that believers attain to the knowledge 
of the truth; that he forgive us our sins; that he preserve us 
from temptations; that he assist our weakness; that he deliver 
us from our miseries. All is simple, but all is grand in this 
divine prayer; it recals man to himself, and, in order to adopt 
it as a model, nothing more is required than to feel our wants, 
and to wish deliverance from them. 

And behold, why I have said that the second iniquitous dis- 
position, from whence the pretext, founded upon not knowing 
how to pray proceeded, is, that they do not sufficiently feel the 
infinite wants of their souls. For, I ask you, my brethren, is 
it necessary to teach a sick person to intreat relief? is a man 
pressed with hunger difficulted how to solicit food? is an un- 
fortunate person, beaten with the tempest and on the point of 
perishing, at a loss how to implore assistance? Alas! cloth the 
urgent necessity alone not amply furnish expressions? In the 
sole sense of our evils, do we not find that animated eloquence, 



218 



ON PRAYER. 



[Sebm. XIIL 



those persuasive emotions, those pressing remonstrances which 
solicit their cure? Has a suffering heart occasion for any master 
to teach it to complain? In it every thing speaks, every thing 
expresses its affliction, every thing announces its sufferings, and 
every thing solicits relief; even its silence is eloquent. 

You yourself, who complain that you know not what method 
to take in praying, in your temporal afflictions, from the in- 
stant that a dangerous malady threatens your life, that an un- 
looked-for event endangers your property and fortune, that an 
approaching death is on the point of snatching from you a per- 
son either dear or necessary; then you raise your hands to hea- 
ven; then you send up your lamentations and prayers; you ad- 
dress yourself to the God who strikes and who relieves; you 
then know how to pray; you have no need of going beyond your 
own heart for lessons and rules to lay your afflictions before 
him, nor do you consult able teachers in order to know what is 
necessary to say to him; you have occasion for nothing but your 
grief, your evils alone have found out the method of instructing 
you. 

Ah! my brethren, if we felt the wants of our soul as we feel 
those of our body; if our eternal salvation interested us as 
much as we are for a fortune of dirt, or for a weak and perish- 
able health, we would sojon be skilful in the divine art of pray- 
er; we would not complain that we had nothing to say in the 
presence of a God of whom we have so much to ask; the mind 
would be little difficulted in finding wherewith to entertain 
him; our evils alone would speak; in spite of ourselves, our 
heart would burst forth in holy effusions, like that of Samuel's 
mother before the ark of the Lord; we would no longer be mas- 
ter of our sorrows and tears; and the most certain mark of our 
want of faith, and that we know ourselves not, is that of not 
knowing what to say to the Lord in the space of a short 
prayer. 

And, after all, is it possible that, in the miserable condition 
of this human life, surrounded as we are with so many dangers; 
made up ourselves of so many weaknesses; on the point, every 
moment, of being led astray by the objects of vanity, corrupted 
by the illusions of the senses, and dragged away by the force of 
example; a continual prey to the tyranny of our inclinations, to 
the dominion of our flesh, to the inconstancy of our heart, to the 
inequalities of our reason, to the caprices of our imagination, to 
the eternal variations of our temper; depressed by loss of favour, 
elated by prosperity, enervated by abundance, soured by po- 
verty, led away by custom, shaken by accidents, flattered with 
praise, irritated by contempt; continually wavering between our 
passions and our duties, between ourselves and the law of God; 
is it possible, I say, that, in a situation so deplorable, we can be 
difficulted what to ask of the Lord, or what to say to him, when 
we appear in his presence? O my God! why then is man not 



Serm. XIII.] 



ON PRAYER. 



219 



less miserable? Or why is he not better acquainted with his 
wants? 

Ah! if you told us, my dear hearer, that you know not where 
to begin in prayer : that your wants are so infinite, your miser- 
ies and your passions so multiplied, that, were you to pretend to 
expose them all to the Lord, you would never have done : if you 
said to us, that the more you search into your heart, the more 
3 r our wounds unfold, the more corruption and disorders do you 
discover in yourself, and that, despairing of being able to relate 
to the Lord the endless detail of your weaknesses, you present 
your heart wholly to him, you leave your evils to speak for you, 
you ground your whole art of prayer on your confusion, your 
humiliation, and your silence; and that, in consequence of hav- 
ing too much to say to him, you say nothing; if you spoke in 
this manner, you would speak the language of faith, and that of 
a penitent king, who, contemplating his repeated relapses, and 
no longer daring to speak to his God in prayer, said, " Lord, I 
am troubled, I am bowed down greatly; I go mourning all the 
day long; for mine iniquities are gone over my head; as a 
heavy burden they are too heavy for me. My heart panteth, 
my strength faileth me; for I will declare mine iniquity, I will 
be sorry for my sin. Forsake me not, O Lord: O my God! be 
not far from me. Make haste to help me, O Lord, my salva- 
tion." Such is the silence of compunctions which forms before 
God the true prayer. 

But to complain that you have no longer any thing to say, 
when you wish to pray: Alas! My dear hearer, when you pre- 
sent yourself before God, do your past crimes hold out nothing 
for you to dread from his judgments, or to ask from his mercy? 
What ! your whole life has perhaps been onlv a sink of debauch- 
eries; you have perverted every thing, grace, your talents, . your 
reason, your wealth, your dignities, all creatures; you haA^e 
passed the best part of your days in the neglect of your God, 
and in all the delusions of the world and of the passions; you 
have vilified your heart by iniquitous attachments, defiled your 
bddy, disordered your imagination, weakened your lights, and 
even extinguished every happy disposition which nature had 
placed in your soul; and the recollection of all this furnishes 
you with nothing in the presence of God ! And it inspires you 
with no idea of the method you ought to adopt, in having re- 
course to him, in order to obtain his forgiveness of such accum- 
ulated crimes? And you have nothing to say to a God whom 
you have so long offended? O man! thy salvation, then, must 
either be without resource, or thou must have other means of 
accomplishing it than those of the divine clemencv and mercy. 

But, my dear hearer, I go further. If you lead a Christian 
life; if, returned from the world and from pleasures, you are at 
last entered into the ways of salvation, you are still more unjust 
in complaining that you find nothing to* say to the Lord in your 



220 



ON PRAYER. [Serm. XIII. 



prayers. What! the singular grace of having opened your 
eyes, of undeceiving you with regard to the world, and with- 
drawing you from the hottom of the abyss; this blessing so rare, 
and denied to so many sinners, doth it give rise to no grateful 
feeling in your heart, when at his feet? Can this recollection 
leave you cold and insensible? Is nothing tender awakened by 
the presence of your benefactor, you who pride yourself upon 
having never forgotten a benefit, and who so pompously display 
the feeling and the excess of your gratitude towards the crea- 
tures? 

Besides, if you feel those endless tendencies, which, in spite 
of your change of life, still rise up within you against the law 
of God; that difficulty which you still have in doing well; that 
unfortunate inclination which you still find within you towards 
evil; those desires of a more perfect virtue, which always turn 
out vain; those resolutions to which you are always faithless; 
those opportunities in which you always find yourself the same; 
those duties which always meet the same repugnance in your 
heart: in a word, if you feel that inexhaustible fund of weakness 
and of corruption which remains with you after your conversion, 
and which alarms so much your virtue, you will not only have 
ample matter to address the Lord in prayer, but your whole life, 
will be one continual prayer* All the dangers which shall threaten 
your weakness, all the accidents which shall shake your faith, 
all the objects which shall open afresh the former wounds of 
your heart, all the inward emotions which shall prove that the 
man of sin lives always within you, will lead you to look up- 
wards to Him from whom alone you expect deliverance from 
them. As the Apostle said, every place will be to you a place 
of prayer; every thing will direct your attention to God, be- 
cause every thing will furnish you with Christian reflections 
upon yourself. 

Besides, my dear hearer, even granting that your own neces- 
sities should not be sufficient to fill the void of your prayer, em- 
ploy a portion of it with the evils of the church ; with the dis- 
sensions of the pastors; with that spirit of schism and revolt 
which seems to be forming in the sanctuary; with the relaxa- 
tion of believers; with the depravity of manners; with the sad 
progress of unbelief, and the diminution of faith among men. 
Lament over the scandals of which you are a continual witness; 
complain to the Lord, with the prophet, that all have forsaken 
him; that every one seeks his own interest; that even the salt 
of the earth hath become tasteless, and that piety is beeome a 
traffic. Intreat of the Lord the consummation of his elect, and 
the fulfilment of his designs upon his church; religious princes, 
faithful pastors, humble and enlightened teachers, knowing and 
disinterested guides; peace to the churches; the extinction of 
error, and the return of all who have gone astray. 

What more shall I add? Intreat the conversion of your re- 



Serm. XIII.] 



ON PRAYER. 



221 



lations, friends, enemies, protectors, and masters; the conver- 
sion of those souls to whom you have been a stumbling-block; 
of those whom you have formerly estranged from piety through 
your derisions and censures; of those who perhaps owe their ir- 
religion and freethinking solely to the impiety of your past dis- 
courses; of those of whom your examples or solicitations have 
formerly either perverted the virtue or seduced the weakness. 
Is it possible that these great objects, at once so sad and so in- 
teresting, cannot furnish a moment's attention to your mind, or 
some feeling to your heart? Every thing which surrounds you 
teaches you to pray; every object, eveiy accident which you 
see around you, provides you with fresh opportunities of raising 
yourself t6 God; the world, retirement, the court, the righteous, 
the sinful, the public and domestic occurrences, the misfortunes 
of some, and the prosperity of others; every thing, in a word, 
which meets your eyes, supplies you with subject of lamenta- 
tion, of prayer, of thanksgiving. Every thing instructs your 
faith; every thing excites your zeal; all grieves your piety, and 
calls forth your gratitude; and, amid so many subjects of pray- 
er, you cannot supply a single instant of prayer ! Surrounded 
with so many opportunities of raising yourself to God, you have 
nothing to say to him when you come to appear in his presence? 
Ah ! My brethren, how far removed must God be from a heart 
which finds it such a punishment to hold converse with him, 
and how little must that master and friend be loved, to whom 
they never wish to speak! 

And behold the last and the principal cause of our incapacity 
in prayer. They know not how to pray and to speak to their God, 
because they do not love him. When the heart loves, it soon finds 
out how to communicate its feelings, and to affect the object of 
its love; it soon knows what it ought to say: Alas ! it cannot 
express all that it feels. Let us establish regularity once more 
in our hearts, my brethren; let us substitute God in place of 
the world; then shall our heart be no longer a stranger before 
God. It is the irregularity of our affections which is the sole 
cause of our incapacity in prayer; eternal riches can never be 
fervently asked when they are not loved; truths can never be 
well meditated upon when they are not relished; and little caft 
be said to a God who is hardly known : favours which are not 
desired, and freedom from passions which are not hated, can 
never be very urgently solicited; in a word, prayer is the lan- 
guage of love; and we know not how to pray, because we know 
not how to love. 

But, as you will say, doth an inclination for prayer depend 
upon us? And how is it possible to pray, with disgusts and 
wanderings of the mind, which are not to be conquered, and 
which render it insupportable? Second pretext, drawn from 
the disgusts and the difficulties of prayer. 



222 



ON PRAYER. 



[Sehm. XIII. 



Part II. One of the greatest excesses of sin is undoubtedly 
that backwardness, and, I may say, that natural dislike which 
we have to prayer. Man, innocent, would have founded his 
whole delight in holding converse with God: all creatures 
Avould have been as an open book, where he would have inces- 
santly meditated upon his works and his wonders; the impres- 
sions of the senses, under the command of reason, would never 
have been able to turn him aside, in spite of himself, from the 
delight and the familiarity of his presence ; his whole life would 
have been one continued contemplation of the truth, and his 
whole happiness in his innocence would have been founded on 
his continual communications with the Lord, and the certainty 
that he would never forsake him. 

Man must therefore be highly corrupted, and sin must have 
made strange alterations in us, to turn into a punishment what 
ought to be our happiness. It is however only too true, that we 
almost all bear in our nature this backwardness and this dislike 
to prayer; and upon these is founded the most universal pre- 
text which is opposed to the discharge of this duty, so essential 
to Christian piety. Even persons, to whom the habit of prayer 
ought to be rendered more pleasing and more familiar, by the 
practice of virtue, continually complain of the disgusts and of 
the constant wanderings which they experience in this holy ex- 
ercise; insomuch, that, looking upon it either as a wearisome 
duty, or as a lost trouble, they abridge its length, and think 
themselves happily quit of a yoke and of a slavery, when this 
moment of weariness and restraint is over. 

Now, I say, that nothing is more unrighteous than to estrange 
ourselves from prayer, on account of the disgusts and wander- 
ings of the mind, which render it painful and disagreeable to 
us; for these disgusts and wanderings originate, 1st. From our 
lukewarmness and our infidelities; or, 2dly. In our being little 
accustomed to prayer; or, 3dly. In the wisdom even of God, 
who tries us, and who wishes to purify our heart, by withhold- 
ing for a time the sensible consolations of prayer. 

Yes, my brethren, the first and the most common source of 
the disgusts and the dryness of our prayers, is the lukewarmness 
and the infidelity of our life. It is, in effect, an injustice to 
pretend that we can bring to prayer a serene and tranquil mind; 
a cool imagination, free from all the vain phantoms by which it 
is agitated; a heart affected with, and disposed to relish the 
presence of its God, — while our whole life, though otherwise vir- 
tuous in the eyes of man, shall be one continual dissipation; 
while we shall continue to live among objects the most calcu- 
lated to move the imagination, and to make those lively impres- 
sions on us which are never done away; in a word, while we shall 
preserve a thousand iniquitous attachments in our heart, which, 
though not absolutely criminal in our eyes, yet trouble, divide, 



Serm. XIIL] ON PRAYER. 



223 



and occupy us, and which weaken in us, or even totally deprive 
us of any relish for God and the things of heaven. 

Alas! my brethren, if the most retired and the most holy 
souls ; if the most recluse penitents, purified by long retreat, and 
by a life altogether devoted to heaven, still found, in the sole 
remembrance of their past manners, disagreeable images, which 
force their way even into their solitude, to disturb the comfort 
and the tranquillity of their prayers ; do we expect that in a life, 
regular I confess, but full of agitations, of occasions by which 
we are led away, of objects which unsettle us, of temptations 
which disquiet, of pleasures which enervate, of fears and hopes 
which agitate us, we shall find ourselves, in prayer, all of a 
sudden new men, purified from all those images which sully 
our mind, freed from all those attachments which come to di- 
vide, and perhaps to corrupt our hearts, in tranquillity from all 
those agitations which continually make such violent and such 
dangerous impressions upon our souls; and that, forgetting for 
a moment the entire world, and all those vain objects which we 
have so lately quitted, and which we still bear in our remem- 
brance and in our heart, we shall, all of a sudden, find ourselves 
raised, before God, to the meditation of heavenly things, pene- 
trated with love for eternal riches, filled with compunction for 
innumerable infidelities which we still love, and with a tran- 
quillity of mind and of heart, which the profoundest retirement, 
and the most rigorous seclusion from the world frequently do 
not bestow? Ah! my brethren, how unjust we are, and into 
what terrible reproaches against ourselves shall the continual 
complaints made by us against the duties of piety one day be 
turned ! 

And, to go farther into this truth, and to enter into a de- 
tail which renders it more evident to you, you complain, in 
the first place, that your mind, incapable of a moment's atten- 
tion in prayer, wanders from it, and flies off in spite of your- 
self. But how can it be otherwise; or how can you find it at- 
tentive and collected, if every thing you do takes off its atten- 
tion and unsettles it; if, in the detail of conduct, you never re- 
collect yourself; if you never accustom yourself to that mental 
reflection, to that life of faith, which, even amid the dissipations 
of the world, finds ample sources of holy reflection? To have 
a collected mind in prayer, you must bring it along with you; 
it is necessary that even your intercourse with sinners, when 
obliged to live among them, the sight of their passions, of their 
anxieties, fears, hopes, joys, chagrins, and wretchedness, supply 
your faith with reflections, and turn your views towards God, 
who alone bestows collectedness of mind and the tranquillity of 
prayer. Then, even in quitting the world and those worldly 
conversations, where duty alone shall have engaged your pre- 
sence, you will find no difficulty in going to recollect yourself 
before God, and in forgetting at his feet those vain agitations 



224 



ON PRAYER. 



[SiBJf. XIII. 



which you have so lately witnessed. On the contrary, the de- 
signs of faith which you shall there have preserved; the blind- 
ness of the worldly, which you shall there have inwardly de- 
plored^ — will cause you to find new comforts at the feet of Jesus 
Christ; you will there, with consolation, recreate yourself from 
the weariness of dissipation and of worldly nothings; you will la- 
ment, with increased satisfaction, over the folly of men who so 
madly pursue after a vapour, a chimerical happiness, winch 
eludes their grasp, and which it is impossible ever to attain, 
for the world in which they seek it cannot bestow it; you will 
there more warmly thank the Lord for having, with so much 
goodness, and notwithstanding your crimes, enlightened and 
separated you from that multitude which must perish; you will 
there see, as in a new light, the happiness of those souls who 
serve him, and whose eyes, being opened upon vanity, no longer 
live but for the truth. 

2dly. You complain that your heart, insensible in prayer, feels 
nothing fervent for its God, but, on the contrary, a disgust which 
renders it insupportable. But how is it possible that your heart, 
wholly engrossed with the things of the earth, filled with ini- 
quitous attachments, inclination for the world, love of yourself, 
schemes for exalting your station, and desires perhaps of pleas- 
ing; how is it possible, I say, that your heart, compounded with 
so many earthly affections, should still have any feeling for the 
things of heaven? It is wholly filled with the creatures; where 
then should God find his place in it? We cannot love both God 
and the world. Thus, when the Israelites had passed the Jor- 
dan, and had eaten of the fruits of the earth, "the manna ceased 
on the morrow after they had eaten of the old corn of the land, 
neither had the children of Israel manna any more;" as if to 
show, that they could not enjoy at the same time both the hea- 
venly nourishment and that of the earth. 

Love of the world, said St. Augustine, like a dangerous fever, 
sheds a universal bitterness through the heart, which renders 
the invisible and eternal riches insipid and disgusting to us. 
Thus, you never come to prayer but with an insurmountable 
disgust: Ah! It is a proof that your heart is diseased; that a 
secret fever, and perhaps unknown to yourself, causes it to lan- 
guish, saps and disgusts it; that it is engrossed by a foreign love. 
Mount to the source of your disgusts towards God, and every- 
thing connected with him, and see if they shall not be found in 
the iniquitous attachments of your -heart; see if you are not still 
a slave to yourself, the vain cares of dress, to frivolous friend- 
ships, to dangerous animosities", to secret envies, to desires of 
rank, to every thing around you: these are the source of the 
evil: apply the remedy to it; take something every day upon 
yourself; labour seriously towards piuifying your heart; you 
will then taste the comforts and the consolations of prayer; then 
the world no longer engrossing your affections, you will find 



Serm. XIIL] 



ON PRAYER. 



225 



your God more worthy of being loved: we soon ardently love 
the only object of our love. 

And, after all, render glory here to the truth. Is it not true 
that the days in which you have been more guarded upon your- 
self; the days in which you have made some sacrifices, to the 
Lord, of your inclinations, of your indolence, of your temper, 
of your aversions; is it not true, that, in these days, you have 
addressed your prayers to the Lord with more peace, more con- 
solation, and more delight? We encounter, with double plea- 
sure, the eves of a master to whom we have lately given some 
striking proof of fidelity ; on the contrary, we are in pain before 
him, when we feel that he has cause of a thousand just re- 
proaches against us; we are then anxious and under restraint; 
we endeavour to hide ourselves from his view, like the first sin- 
ner; we no longer address him with that overflowing heart, and 
that confidence which a conscience pure and void of offence in- 
spires; and the moments when we are under the necessity of 
supporting his divine presence are anxiously counted. 

Thus, when Jesus Christ commands us to pray, he begins with 
ordering us to watch. He thereby means us to understand that 
vigilance is the only preparation to prayer; that to love to pray, 
it is necessary to watch; and that fondness for and consolations 
in prayer, are granted only to the recollection and to the sacri- 
fices of vigilance. I know, that, if you do not pray, you can 
never watch over yourself and live holily ; but I likewise know, 
that, if you exert not that vigilance which causes to live holily, 
you can never pray with comfort and with consolation. Prayer, 
it is true, obtains for us the grace of vigilance; but it is yet 
more true, that vigilance alone can draw down upon us the gift 
and the usage of the prayer. 

And, from thence, it is easy to conclude, that a life of the 
world, even granting it to be the most innocent; that is to say, 
a life of pleasure, continual gaming, dissipation, and theatrical 
amusements, which you call so innocent, when attended with no 
other harm than that of disqualifying you for prayer; when this 
worldly life, which you so strongly justify, should contain no- 
thing more criminal than that of disgusting you at prayer, of 
drying up your heart, of unsettling your imagination, of weak- 
ening your faith, and of filling your mind with anxiety and 
trouble; when we should judge of the security of this state 
merely from what you continually tell us, that you are incapa- 
ble of arranging yourself for prayer, and that, on your part, it 
is always attended with an insupportable disgust and weariness; 
I say, that, for these reasons alone, the most innocent worldly 
life is a life of sin and reprobation; a life for which there is no 
salvation: for salvation is promised solely to prayer; salvation 
is not attainable but through the aid of prayer; salvation is 
granted only to perseverance in prayer; consequently, every life 
which places an invincible obstacle in the way of prayer can 



226 



ON PRAYER. 



[Serm. XIII. 



have no pretensions to salvation. Now, you are fully sensible 
yourselves, my brethren, that a life of dissipation, of gam- 
ing, of pleasure, and of public places, puts an essential obsta- 
cle, in the way of prayer; that it places in your heart, in 
your imagination, in your senses, an invincible disgust at pray- 
er, an unsettledness incompatible with the spirit of prayer: you 
continually complain of this; you even make use of it as a pre- 
text not to pray; and from thence be assured that there is no 
salvation for the worldly life, even the most innocent; for, 
wherever prayer is impossible, salvation, must likewise be so. 
First reason of the disgusts and of the wanderings of our pray- 
ers; the lukewarmness and the infidelity of our life. 

The second is our little usage of prayer. We pray with dis- 
gust, because we seldom pray. For, 1st, It is the practice alone 
of prayer which will gradually calm your mind, which will in- 
sensibly banish from it the images of the world and of vanity, 
which will disperse all those clouds which produce all the dis-- 
gusts and the wanderings of your prayers. 2dly. You must ask 
for a long time before you can obtain; you must press, solicit, 
and even importune; the sweets and the consolations of prayer 
are the fruit and the reward of prayer itself. 3dly. There must 
be familiarity, in order to find pleasure in it. If you seldom 
pray, the Lord will be a strange and an unknown God to you, 
as I may say, before whom you will feel yourself embarrassed, 
and under a kind of restraint; with whom you will never ex- 
perience those overflowings of heart, that sweet confidence, that 
holy freedom, which familiarity alone bestows, and which con- 
stitute the whole pleasure of the divine intercourse. God re- 
quires to be known, in order to be loved. The world loses by 
being examined; the surface, and the first glance of it, are alone 
smiling. Search deeper, and it is no longer but emptiness, 
vanity, anxious care, agitation, and misery. But the Lord must 
be tasted, says the prophet, in order to feel how good he is. 
The more you know, the more you love him: the more you 
unite yourself to him, the more do you feel that there is no true 
happiness on the earth but that of knowing and of loving him. 

It is the use, therefore, of prayer, which alone can render 
prayer pleasing. Thus we see that the generality of persons 
who complain of the disgusts and of the wanderings of their 
prayers, seldom pray; think this important duty fulfilled, when 
they have bestowed upon the Lord a few hasty moments of 
thoughtlessness and restraint; forsake it on the first symptom 
of disgust; make no exertion to reduce and to familiarize their 
mind to it; and, far from considering prayer as being rendered 
only more necessary to them, by their invincible repugnance to 
it, they regard that very repugnance as a legal excuse, which 
dispenses them altogether from it. 

But how find time in the world, you will say, to make so 
long and so frequent a use of prayer? You, my dear hearer, not 



Serm. XIIL] ON PRAYER. 



find time to pray? But wherefore is time given to you, but to 
intreat of God to forget your crimes, to look upon you with 
eyes of compassion, and to place you one day among the num- 
ber of his holy ! You have not time to pray? But you have 
not time, then, to be a Christian: For, a man who prays not, 
is a man who has no God, no worship, and no hope. You have 
not time to pray? But prayer is the beginning of all good; 
and, if you do not pray, you have not yet performed a single 
work for eternal life. Ah ! my brethren, is time ever wanting 
to solicit the favours of the earth, to importune the master, to 
besiege those who are in place, to bestow upon pleasures, or 
upon idleness? What useless moments! What languid and 
tiresome days, through the mere gloom which ever accompanies 
idleness ! What time lost in vain ceremonials, in idle conversa- 
tions, in boundless gaming, in fruitless subjections, in grasping 
at chimeras which move farther and farther from us! Great 
God ! And time is wanted to ask heaven of thee, to appease thy 
wrath, and to supplicate thine eternal mercies ! How humbly, 
O my God, must salvation be estimated, when time is wanted 
to intreat of thy mercy to save us ! And how much are we to 
be deplored, to find so many moments for the world, and to be 
unable to find a single one for eternity ! Second cause of the 
disgusts, and of the wanderings of your prayers; the little use 
of prayer itself. 

It is true, my brethren, that this reason is not so general but 
that souls, the most faithful to prayer, are often seen to expe- 
rience all those disgusts and those wanderings of which I speak; 
but, I say, that these disgusts proceed from the wisdom of God, 
who means to purify them, and who leads them by that path, 
only in order to fulfil his eternal designs of mercy upon them: 
last reason; that, consequently, far from being repulsed by what 
they find gloomy and disagreeable in prayer, they ought to per- 
severe in it with even more fidelity than if the Lord had shed 
upon them the most abundant and the most sensible consolations. 

1st. Because you ought to consider these disgusts as the just 
punishment of your past infidelities . Is it not reasonable that God 
make you expiate the criminal voluptuousness of your worldly 
life by the disgusts and the sorrows of piety? Weakness of tem- 
perament does not perhaps permit you to punish, by corporeal 
sufferings, the licentiousness of your past manners; is it not just 
that God supply that, by the punishment, and the inward afflic- 
tions of the mind? Would you pretend to pass in an instant from 
the pleasures of the world to those of grace; from the viands of 
Egypt to the milk and honey of the land of promise, without 
the Lord having first made you to undergo the barrenness and 
the fatigues of the desert; and, in a word, that he should not 
chastise the delights, if I may venture to say so, of guilt, but by 
those of virtue. 

2dly. You have so long refused yourself to God, in spite of 



228 



ON PRAYER. [Serm. XIII. 



the most lively inspirations of his grace, which recalled you to 
the truth and to the light; you have so long suffered him to 
knock at the gate of your heart hefore you opened it to him; 
you have disputed, struggled against, wavered, deferred so much, 
before you gave yourself to him; is it not just that he leave you 
to solicit for some time before he give himself to you with all 
the consolations of his grace ? The delays and the tarryings of 
the Lord are the just punishment of your own. 

But, even admitting these reasons to be less weighty? how do 
you know if the Lord thereby mean not to render this exilement 
and this separation in which we live from him more hateful to 
you, and to increase the fervency of your longings for that im- 
mortal country where truth, seen in open day, will always ap- 
pear lovely, because we shall see it such as it is? How do you 
know if he thereby mean not to inspire you with new compunc- 
tion for your past crimes, by making you sensible, at every mo- 
ment, of the contrariety and disgust which they have left in 
your heart to the truth and to righteousness? Lastly, how do 
you know, if the Lord mean not, by these disgusts, to perfect 
the purification of what may as yet be too human in your piety? 
If he mean not to establish your virtue upon that truth which 
is always the same, and not upon inclination and fancy, which 
incessantly change; upon rules which are eternal, and not upon 
consolations which are transitory; upon faith which never fails 
to sacrifice the visible for the invisible riches, and not upon feel- 
ing, which leaves to the world almost the same empire that grace 
hath over your heart? A piety wholly of fancy goes a short way, 
if not sustained and confirmed by the truth. It is dangerous 
to let our fidelity depend upon the feeling dispositions of a heart 
which is never an instant the same, and upon which every ob- 
ject makes new impressions. The duties which only please when 
they console, do not please long; and that virtue which is solely 
founded on fancy can never sustain itself, because it rests only 
upon ourselves. 

For, after all, if you seek only the Lord in your prayers, 
provided that the way by which he leads you conducts to him, 
it ought to matter little to you whether it be by that of disgusts 
or of consolations, for, being the surest, it ought always to ap- 
pear preferable to all others. If you pray only to attract more 
aids from heaven in relief of your wants, or in support of your 
weakness, faith teaching you that prayer, even when accompanied 
with those disgusts and those drynesses, obtains the same favours, 
produces the same effects, and is equally acceptable to God as that 
in which sensible consolations are found: What do I say? that 
it may become even more agreeable to the Lord, through your 
acceptance of the difficulties which you there encounter; faith 
teaching you this, you ought to be equally faithful to prayer as 
if it held out the most sensible attractions, otherwise it would 
not be God whom you sought, but yourselves; it would not be 



Serm. XIIL] 



ON PRAYER. 



229 



eternal riches, but vain and fleeting consolations; it would not 
be the remedies of faith, but the supports of your self-love. 

Thus, be whom you may who now listen to me, imitate the wo- 
man of Canaan; be faithful to prayer, and, in the fulfilment of 
this duty, you will find all the rest sustained and rendered easy. 
If a sinner, pray; it was through prayer alone that the publican 
and the sinful woman of the gospel obtained feelings of com- 
punction and the grace of a thorough penitence; and prayer is 
the only source and the only path of righteousness. If right- 
eous, still pray; perseverance in faith and in piety is promised 
only to prayer; and by that it was that Job, that David, that 
Tobias, persevered to the end. If you live amid sinners, and 
your duty does not permit you to withdraw yourself from 
the sight of their irregularities and examples, pray: the great- 
er the dangers, the more necessary does prayer become; and 
the three children in the flames, and Jonah in the belly of 
a monster, found safety only through prayer. If the engage- 
ments of your birth, or of your station, attach you to the 
court of kings, pray: Esther, in the court of Ahasuerus, 
Daniel in that of Darius, the prophets in the palaces of 
the kings of Israel, were solely indebted to prayer for their 
life and salvation. If you live in retirement, pray: solitude 
itself becomes a rock, if a continual intercourse with God 
does not defend us against ourselves; and Judith, in the secrecy 
of her house, and the widow Anna in the temple, and the An- 
thonies in the desert, found the fruit and the security of their 
retreat in prayer alone. If established in the church for the 
instruction of the people, pray: all the power and all the success 
of your ministry must depend upon your prayers; and the apos- 
tles converted the universe solely because they had appropriated 
nothing to themselves but prayer and the preaching of the gos- 
pel. Lastly, Be whom you may, I again repeat it, in prosperity 
or in indigence, in joy or in affliction, in trouble or in peace, 
in fervency or in despondency, in lusts or in the ways of right- 
eousness, advanced in virtue, or still in the first steps of 
penitence, pray: prayer is the safety of all stations, the con- 
solation of all sorrows, the duty of all conditions, the soul of 
piety, the support of faith, the grand foundation of religion, 
and all religion itself. O My God ! shed then upon us that 
spirit of grace and of prayer which was to be the distinguishing 
mark of thy church, and the portion of a new people; and purify 
our hearts and our lips, that we may be enabled to offer up to 
thee pure homages, fervent sighs, and prayers worthy of the 
eternal riches which thou hast so often promised to those who 
shall have well intreated them. 



230 FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. [Serm. XIV. 



SERMON XIV. 
FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. 

Matthew v. 43. 

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour and 
hate thine enemy: But I say unto you, love your enemies. 

It is commonly believed that a degree of indulgence and cau- 
tion had been used by the legislator of the Jews, in publishing 
the law on forgiveness of injuries, that, obliged to accommodate 
it, in some respect, to the weakness of a carnal people, and 
otherwise persuaded that, of all virtues, that of loving an enemy 
was the most difficult to the heart of man, he was satisfied with 
regulating and prescribing bounds for revenge. It was only in 
order to prevent great excesses, says St. Augustin, that he meant 
to give authority to smaller ones. That law, like all the others, 
had its sanctity, its goodness, its justice; but it was rather an 
establishment of polity than a rule of piety. It was calculated 
to maintain the internal tranquillity of the state; but it neither 
touched the heart nor struck at the root of hatreds and revenge. 
The only effect proposed, was either to restrain the aggressor, 
by threatening him with the same punishment with which he 
had grieved his brother, or to put a check upon the irritation of 
the offended, by letting him see that, if he exceeded in the satis- 
faction required, he exposed himself to undergo all the surplus 
of his revenge. 

Philosophers, in their morality, had also placed the forgive- 
ness of injuries among the number of virtues; but that was a 
pretext of vanity rather than a rule of discipline. It is because 
revenge seemed to them to carry along with it something, I 
know not what, of mean and passionate, which would have dis- 
figured the portrait and the tranquillity of their ideal sage, 
that it appeared disgraceful to them to be unable to rise supe- 
rior to an injury. The forgiveness of their enemies was solely 
founded, therefore, upon the contempt in which they held them. 
They avenged themselves by disdaining revenge; and pride 
readily gave up the pleasure of hurting those who have injured 
us, for the pleasure which was found in despising them. 

But the law of the gospel, upon loving our enemies, neither 
flatters pride, nor spares self-love. In the forgiveness of in- 
juries nothing ought to indemnify the Christian but the consola- 
tion of imitating Jesus Christ, and of obeying him; but the 



Serm. XIV.] FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. 231 



claims which, in an enemy, prove to him a brother; but the 
hope of meeting, before the Eternal Judge, with the same in- 
dulgence which he shall have used towards men. Nothing 
ought to limit him in his charity, but charity itself, which hath 
no bounds, which excepts neither places, times, nor persons, 
which ought never to be extinguished. And, should the reli- 
gion of Christians have no other proof against unbelief than the 
sublime elevation of this maxim, it would always have this pre- 
eminence in sanctity, and consequently in apparent truth over 
all the sects which have ever appeared upon the earth. 

Let us unfold, therefore, the motives and the rules of this 
essential point of the law : the motives, by establishing the equity 
of the precept through the very pretexts which seem to oppose 
it; the rules, by laying open the illusions under which every 
one justifies to himself their infractions; that is t© say, the in- 
justice of our hatreds and the falsity of our reconciliations. 

Part I. The three principles which usually bind men to 
each other, and by which are formed all human unions and 
friendships, are fancy, cupidity, and vanity. Fancy— We follow 
a certain propensity of nature, which, being the cause of our 
finding, in some persons, a greater similarity to our own in- 
clinations, perhaps also greater aEowances for our faults, binds 
us to them, and occasions us to find, in their society, a comfort 
which becomes weariness in that of the rest of men. Cupidity 
— We seek out useful friends; from the moment that they are 
necessary to our pleasure or to our fortune, they become worthy 
of our friendship; interest is a grand charm to the majority of 
hearts; the titles which render us powerful, are quickly trans- 
muted into qualities which render us apparently amiable, and 
friends are never wanting when we can pay the friendship of 
those who love us. Lastly, Vanity — Friends who do us honour 
are always dear to us. It would seem that, in loving them, we 
enter, as it were, into partnership with them in that distinc- 
tion which they enjoy in the world; we seek to deck ourselves, 
as I may say, with their reputation; and, being unable to reach 
their merit, we pride ourselves in their society, in order to have 
it supposed that, at least, there is not much betwixt us, and 
that like loves like. 

These are the three great ties of human society. Religion 
and charity unite almost nobody; and from thence it is, that r 
from the moment men offend our fancy, that they are unfavoura- 
ble to our interests, or that they wound our reputation and 
our vanity, the human and brittle ties which united us to them 
are broken asunder; our heart withdraws from them, and no 
longer finds in itself, with respect to them, but animosity and 
bitterness. And behold the three most general sources of those 
hatreds which men nourish against each other; which change 
all the sweets of societies into endless inveteracies: which empoi- 



232 FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. [Serm. XIV. 



son all the delight of conversations, and all the innocency of 
mutual intercourse; and which, attacking religion in the heart, 
nevertheless present themselves to us under appearances of 
equity which justify them in our eyes and strengthen us in 
them. 

I say, from the moment that men offend our fancy; and this 
is the first pretext, and the first source of our withdrawing from, 
and of our hatreds against our brethren. You say, that you can- 
not accord with such a person; that every thing in him offends 
and displeases you; that it is an antipathy which you cannot 
conquer; that all his manners seem fashioned to irritate you; 
that to see him would answer the sole purpose of augmenting 
the natural aversion which you have to him; and that nature 
hath placed within us hatreds and likings, conformities and 
aversions, for which she alone is to be answerable. 

To this I might at once answer, by establishing the founda- 
tions of the Christian doctrine upon loving our brethren : Is that 
man, in consequence of displeasing, and being disagreeable to 
your fancy, less your brother, child of God, citizen of Heaven, 
member of Jesus Christ, and inheritor of the eternal promises? 
Doth his humour, his character, whatever it may be, efface 
any one of those august traits which he hath received upon the 
sacred font, which unite him to you by divine and immortal 
ties, and which ought to render him dear and respectable to 
you? When Jesus Christ commands us to love our brethren as 
ourselves, doth he mean to make a precept which costs nothing 
to the heart, and in the fulfilment of which we found neither 
difficulty nor hardship? All! What occasion hath he to com- 
mand us to love our brethren, if, in virtue of that command- 
ment, we were obliged to love only those for whom we feel a 
natural fancy and inclination. The heart hath no occasion, on 
this point, for precept; it is its own law. The precept then 
supposes a difficulty on our part: Jesus Christ hath, therefore 
foreseen that it would be hard upon us to love our brethren 
that we should find within us antipathies and dislikes which 
would withdraw us from them; and behold why he hath attach- 
ed so much merit to the observance of this single point, and 
hath so often declared to us, that, to observe it, was to observe 
the whole law. Aversion to our brethren, far then from justi- 
fying our estrangement from them, renders to us, on the con- 
trary, the obligation of loving them more precise, and places us 
personally in the case of the precept. 

But besides, ought a Christian to be regulated by fancy and 
humour, or by the principles of reason, of faith, of religion, and 
of grace? And since when is the natural fancy, which we are 
commanded by the gospel to oppose, become a privilege which 
dispenses us from its rules? If the repugnance felt for duties 
were a title of exemption, where is the believer who would not 
be quit of the whole law, and who would not find his justified- 



Serm. XIV.] FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. 233 



tion and his innocency, in proportion as he felt a greater degree 
of corruption in his heart? Are our fancies our law? Is reli- 
gion only the support, and not the remedy of nature? Is it not 
a weakness, even in the eyes of the world, to regulate our steps 
and our sentiments, our hatreds and our love towards men, 
merely upon the caprices of a fancy for which we can give no 
reason ourselves? Do men of this description do great credit, 
I do, not say to religion, but to humanity? And are they not, 
even to the world itself, a spectacle of contempt, of derision, 
and of censure ? What a chaos would society be, if fancy alone 
were to decide upon our duties, and upon reciprocal attentions, 
and if men were to be united by no other law? Now, if the 
rules, even of society, exact, that fancy alone be not the sole 
principle of our conduct towards the rest of men, should the 
gospel be more indulgent on that point? — the gospel, which 
preaches only self-denial; which everywhere commands us to 
do violence upon ourselves, and to strive against our fancies and 
our affections; which demands that we act through views superior 
to flesh and blood, and that we hesitate not to sacrifice to the 
sanctity of faith, and to the sublimity of its rules, not only our 
caprices, but our most legal inclinations. 

It is therefore absurd to allege to us an aversion to your bro- 
ther, which is itself your guilt. I might further say: You 
complain that your brother is displeasing to you, and that it is 
not possible for you to bear with, or to be in agreement with 
him: but, do you suppose that you yourself are displeasing to 
none? Can you guarantee to us, that you are universally liked, 
and that every one applauds and approves you? Now, if you 
exact, that every thing offensive in your manners be excused, 
upon the goodness of your heart, and on account of those essen- 
tial qualities upon which you pride yourself; if to you it appear 
unreasonable to be offended at nothings, and by certain sallies 
which we cannot always command; if you insist upon being 
judged by the consequence, by the ground-work, by the recti- 
tude of your sentiments and conduct, and not in consequence 
of those humours which sometimes involuntarily escape you, 
and upon which it is very difficult to be always guarded against 
one's self; have the same equity for your brother; apply the 
same rule to yourself; bear with Mm as you have occasion to 
be borne with yourself; and do not justify, by your estrange- 
ment from him, the unjust aversions which may be had to 
yourself. And this rule is so much the more equitable as that 
you have only to cast your eyes upon what is continually pass- 
ing in the world, to be convinced that those who are loudest in 
trumpeting forth the faults of their brethren are the very per- 
sons with whom nobody can agree, who are the pest of societies, 
and a grievance to the rest of men. 

And I might here demand of you, my dear hearer, if this 
principle of contrariety, which renders your brother so insup- 



234 



FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. [Serm. XIV. 



portable to you, be not more in yourself; that is to say, in your 
pride, in the capriciousness of your temper, in the contrariety 
of your character, than in his; demand of you, if all the world 
see in him what you believe to see yourself; if his friends, his 
relations, his intimates, look upon him with the same eyes that 
you do? What do I know, I might demand of you, if that 
which displeases you in him be not perhaps his good qualities : 
if his talents, his reputation, his credit, and his fortune, have 
not perhaps a greater share in your aversion than his faults; 
and, if it be not his merit or his rank which have hitherto in 
your sight constituted his whole crime? We are so easily de- 
ceived in this point ! Envy is a passion so masked, and so art- 
ful in disguising itself! As there is something mean and odi- 
ous in it, and as it is a secret confession made to ourselves of 
our own mediocrity, it always shows itself to us under foreign 
outsides, which completely conceal it from us; but fathom your 
heart, and you will see that all those, who either surpass, or 
who shine with too much lustre near you, have the misfortune 
to displease you; that you find amiable only those who have 
nothing to contest with you; that all who rise above, or are 
even equal to you, constrain and hurt you; and that, to have a 
claim to your friendship, it is necessary to have none either to 
your pretensions or expectancies. 

But I go still further, and I intreat you to listen to me. I 
admit your brother to have more faults than even you accuse 
him of having. Alas ! You are so gentle and so friendly to- 
wards those from whom you expect your fortune and your 
establishment, and whose temper, haughtiness, and manners 
shock you. You bear with all their pride, their repulses, their 
scorns; you swallow all their inequalities and caprices: You are 
never disheartened; your patience is aiways greater than your 
antipathy and your repugnance, and you neglect nothing to 
please. Ah ! If you regarded your brother, as he upon whom 
depends your eternal salvation, as he to whom you are to be in- 
debted, not for a fortune of dross, and an uncertain establish- 
ment, but for the fortune even of your eternity, would you fol- 
low, with regard to him, the caprice of your fancy? Would you 
not conquer the unjust antipathy which estranges you from him? 
Would you suffer so much in putting your inclinations in uni- 
son with your eternal interests, and in doing upon yourself so 
useful and so necessary a violence? You bear with every thing for 
the world and for vanity; and you cry out, how hard! from 
the moment that a single painful proceeding is exacted of you 
for eternity. 

And say not that there are caprices of nature, of which no 
account can be given, and that we are not the masters of our 
fancies and likings. I grant this to a certain point; but there 
is a love of reason and of religion, which ought always to gain 
ascendancy over that of nature. The gospel exacts not that you 



Serm. XIV.] FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. 



235 



have a fancy for your brother, it exacts that you love him; 
that is to say, that you bear with him, that you excuse him, 
that you conceal his faults, that you serve him, in a word, that 
you do for him whatever you would wish to have done for your- 
self. Charity is not a blind, and capricious fancy, a natural 
liking, a sympathy of temper and disposition; it is a just, en- 
lightened, and reasonable duty; a love which takes its rise in 
the impulses of grace, and in the views of faith. It is not 
rightly loving our brethren, to love them only through fancy; 
it is loving one's self. Charity alone enables us to love them as 
we ought, and it alone can form real and stedfast friends. For 
fancy is continually changing, and charity never dieth; fancy 
seeks only itself, and charity seeketh not its own interest, but 
the interest of whom it loves; fancy is not a proof against every 
thing, a loss, a proceeding, a disgrace, — and charity riseth su- 
perior to death: fancy loves only its own conveniency; and 
charity findeth nothing amiss, and suffereth every thing for 
whom it loveth; fancy is blind, and often renders even the vices 
of our brethren amiable to us; and charity never giveth praise 
to iniquity, and in others loveth only the truth. The friends 
of grace are therefore much more to be relied on than those of 
nature. The same fancy which unites the manners, is often a 
moment after, the cause of separating them; but the ties formed 
by charity eternally endure. 

Such is the first source of our likings and of our hatreds, the 
injustices and the capriciousness of our fancy. Interest is the 
second; for nothing is more common than to hear you justify- 
ing your animosities, by telling us that such a man hath ne- 
glected nothing to ruin you: that he has been the mean of 
blasting your fortune; that he continually excites vexatious 
matters against you; that you find him an insuperable impedi- 
ment in your way, and that it is difficult to love an enemy so 
bent on injuring you. 

But, granting that you speak the truth, I answer to you: 
To all the other ills which your brother hath caused to you, 
why should you add that of hating him, which is the greatest 
of all, since all the others have tended to ravish from you only 
fleeting and frivolous riches, while this is the cause of ruin to 
your soul, and deprives you for ever of your claim to an im- 
mortal kingdom? In hating him, you injure yourself much 
more than all his malignity with respect to you could ever do : 
he hath usurped the patrimony of your fathers: it may be so; 
and, in order to avenge yourself, you renounce the inheritance 
of the heavenly Father and the eternal patrimony of Jesus 
Christ. You take your revenge then upon yourself; and, in 
order to console yourself for the ills done to you by your bro- 
ther, you provide for yourself one without end and without 
measure. 

And, moreover, Does your hatred towards your brother re- 



236 FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. [Serm, XIV. 



store any of those advantages which he hath snatched from you? 
Does it ameliorate your condition? What do you reap from 
your animosity and your rancour? In hating him, you say 
that you console yourself; and this is the only consolation left 
to you. What a consolation, great God ! is that of hatred, that 
is to say, of a gloomy and furious passion, which gnaws the 
heart, sheds anguish and sorrow through ourselves, and begins 
by punishing and rendering us miserable ! What a cruel plea- 
sure is that of hating, that is to say, of bearing on the heart a 
load of rancour, which empoisons every other moment of life ! 
What a barbarous method of consoling one's self! And are you 
not worthy of pity, to seek a resource in your evils, which an- 
swers no purpose but that of eternising, by hatred, a transitory 
injury? 

But let us cease this human language, and speak that of the 
gospel, to which our mouths are consecrated. If you were 
Christian, my dear hearer; if you had not lost faith, far from 
hating those whom God hath made instrumental in blasting 
your hopes and your projects of fortune, you would regard them 
as the instruments of God's mercies upon your soul, as the mi- 
nisters of your sanctification, and the blessed rocks which have 
been the means of saving you from shipwreck. You would 
nave been lost in credit and in elevation; you would then have 
neglected your God: your ambition would have increased with 
your fortune, and death would have surprised you in the vortex 
of the world of passions and of human expectancies. But, in 
order to save your soul, the Lord, in his great mercy, hath rais- 
ed up obstacles which have stopt your course. He hath em- 
ployed an envious person, a rival to supplant you, to keep you 
at a distance from favours, and to place himself betwixt you 
and the precipice, into which you was running headlong, for 
ever to perish : He hath seconded, as I may say, his ambition ; 
he hath favoured his designs; and, through an incomprehen- 
sible excess of goodness towards you, he hath crossed your 
worldly schemes: He hath raised up your enemy in time, in 
order to save you in eternity. You ought therefore to adore the 
eternal designs of his justice and of his mercy upon men; to 
consider your brother as the blessed cause of your salvation; to 
intreat of God, that, seeing his ambition or his bad intentions 
have been employed to save you he may inspire him with 
sincere repentance, and that the person who hath been the 
instrument of your salvation be not permitted to perish himself. 

Yes, my brethren, our hatreds proceed entirely from our 
want of faith. Alas ! If we regarded every thing which passes, 
as a vapour without substance; if we were thoroughly convinc- 
ed that all this is nothing, that salvation is the great and im- 
portant affair, and that our treasure and our true riches are 
only in eternity, where, in the twinkling of an eye, we shall 
be; if we were convinced of it, alas! we would consider men 



Serm. XIV.] FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. 



237 



who passionately quarrel and dispute with each other for the 
dignities of the earth, as children who fall out among them- 
selves for the playthings which amuse their eye, whose child- 
ish hatreds and animosities turn upon nothings, which infancy 
alone, and the feeble state of reason, magnify in their eyes. 
Tranquil on the greatest and most important events, on the loss 
of the patrimony of their fathers and the fall of their family, 
and keen even to excess, when deprived of any of the little trif- 
ling objects which delight their infancy. Thus, O my God, 
foolish and puerile men feel not the loss of their heavenly inhe- 
ritance, of that immortal patrimony bequeathed to them by 
Jesus Christ, and which their brethren are already enjoying in 
heaven. They unconcernedly see the kingdom of God, and the 
only true riches, pass away from them; and, like children, they 
are inflamed with rage, and mutually arm against each other, 
from the instant that their frivolous possessions are encroached 
upon, or that any attempt is made to deprive them of those 
childish playthings, the only value or importance of which is 
that of serving to deceive their feeble reason, and to amuse 
their childhood. 

For a Christian, interest is therefore an unworthy and crimi- 
nal pretext for his hatred towards his brethren; but vanity, 
which is their last resource, is still less excusable. 

For, my brethren, we wish to be approved, and to have our 
faults as well as our virtues applauded; and, although we feel 
our own weaknesses, yet we are so unreasonable as to exact 
that others see them not, and that they even give credit to us 
for certain qualities, which we inwardly reproach to ourselves 
as vices. We could wish that all mouths were filled solely with 
our praises; and that the world, which forgives nothing, which 
spares not even its masters, should admire in us what it cen- 
sures in others. 

In effect, you complain that your enemy hath both privately 
and publicly decried you; that he hath added calumny to slan- 
der; that he hath attacked you in the tenderest and most feel- 
ing quarter, and that he hath neglected nothing to blast your 
honour and your reputation in the opinion of men. 

But, before replying to this, I might first say to you, mis- 
trust the reports which have been made to you of your brother; 
the most innocent speeches reach us so empoisoned, through 
the malignity of the tongues which have conveyed them; there 
are so many mean flatterers, who seek to be agreeable at the 
expense of those who are not so; there are so many dark and 
wicked minds, whose only pleasure is in finding out evil where 
none is meant, and in sowing dissension among men; there are 
so many volatile and imprudent characters, who unseasonably, 
and with an envenomed air, repeat what at first had been only 
said with the most innocent intentions; there are so many men, 
naturally given to the hyperbole, and in whose mouth every 



238 



FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. [Skrm. XIV. 



tiling is magnified, and departs from the natural and simple 
truth: I here appeal to yourself. Has it never happened to 
you, that your most innocent sayings have hecn empoisoned, 
and circumstances added to your recitals, which you had never 
even thought of? Have you not then exclaimed against the in- 
justice and the malignity of the repeaters? Why might not you, 
in your turn, have been deceived? And, if every thing which 
passes through a variety of channels, be in general adulterated, 
and never reach us in its original purity, why should you sup- 
pose that discourses, which relate to you alone, were exempted 
from the same lot, and were entitled to more attention and 
belief? 

You will no doubt reply, that these general maxims are not 
the point in question, and that the actions of which you com- 
plain, are not doubtful, but positive. I admit it; and I ask, if 
your brother have not, on his side, the same reproaches to make 
to you; if you have always been very lenient and very chari- 
table to his faults; if you have always rendered justice even to 
his good qualities; if you have never permitted him to be reviled 
in your presence; if you have not aided the malignity of such 
discourses by an affected moderation, which hath only tended 
to blow up the fire of detraction, and to supply new traits 
against your brother; I ask you, if you are even circumspect 
towards the rest of men; if you readily forgive the weakness of 
others; if your tongue be not, in general, dipt in wormwood 
and gall; if the best established reputation be not always in 
danger in your hands; and, if the saddest and most private his- 
tories do not speedily become matter of notoriety, through 
your malignity and imprudence? O man! Thou pushest deli- 
cacy and sensibility to such lengths upon whatever regards 
thyself! We have occasion for all the terror of our ministry, 
and for all the other most weighty inducements of religion, to 
bring thee to forgive to thy brother a single speech, frequently a 
word, which imprudence, which chance, which circumstances, 
which perhaps a just resentment hath forced from him; and the 
licentiousness of thy discourses towards others knows neither the 
bounds of politeness nor of that decency which the world itself 
prescribes. 

But, granting that you have nothing to reproach yourself on 
the part of moderation towards your brother, what do you 
gain by hating him? Do you thereby efface the fatal impres- 
sions which his discourses may have left on the minds of men? 
On the contrary, you inflict a fresh wound upon your heart; 
you give yourself a stab which carries death to your soul; you 
wrench the sword from his hands, if I may speak in this man- 
ner, in order to plunge it into yourself. By the innocency of 
your manners, and the integrity of your conduct, you make the 
injustice of his discourses evident; destroy, by a life free 
from reproach, the prejudices to which he may have given rise 



Serm. XIV.] FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. 



239 



against you; make the meanness and the iniquity of his calum- 
nies revert upon himself, by the practice of those virtues ex- 
actly opposite to the faults which he imputes to you: such is 
the just and legal manner of revenging yourself. Triumph 
over his malice, by your manners and by your silence: you 
will heap living coals upon his head; you will gain the public 
on your side; you will leave nothing to your enemy but the 
infamy of his passion and of his impositions. But hating him 
is the revenge of the weak and the sad consolation of the guilty; 
in a word, it is the only refuge of those who can find none in 
virtue and in innocence. 

But let us now quit all these reasonings, and come to the 
essential point. You are commanded to love those who despite- 
ful! y use and calumniate you; to pray for them, to intreat 
their conversion to God, that he change their rancorous heart, 
that he inspire them with sentiments of peace and of charity, 
and that he place them among the number of his holy. You 
are commanded to consider them as already citizens of the hea- 
venly Jerusalem, with whom you shall form only one voice in 
singing the immortal praises of grace. You are commanded to 
look upon injuries as blessings, the punishment of your hid- 
den crimes, for which you have so often merited to be covered 
with confusion before men; as the price of the kingdom of 
God, which is promised to those alone who with piety bear 
with persecution and calumny. 

For, after all, it must come to this. Self-love alone would 
make us to love those who love us, who praise us, who publish 
our virtues, false or true; such was the whole virtue of the 
Pagans; for, said Jesus Christ, if ye love those that love you 
what reward have ye; do not even the publicans so? But reli- 
gion goes farther : it requires us to love those who hate and per- 
secute us: it fixes at that price the mercies of God upon us 
and declares to us, that no forgiveness is to be expected for 
ourselves, if we grant it not to our brethren. 

And, candidly, would you have God to forget the crimes and 
the horrors of your whole life, to be insensible to his own glory 
which you have so often insulted, while you cannot prevail upon 
yourself to forget a word; while you are so warm, so delicate, 
and so passionately upon the interests of your glory; you who 
perhaps enjoy a reputation which you have never merited; you, 
who, were you to be known such as you are, would be covered 
with eternal shame and confusion; you, in a word, of whom the 
most injurious discourses only imperfectly represent the secret 
wretchedness, and of which God alone knoweth the extent? 
Great God ! how little shall sinners have to say for themselves, 
when thou wilt pronounce against them the sentence of their 
eternal condemnation ! 

You will probably tell us, that you perfectly agree to the du- 
ties which religion hereupon imposes, but that the laws of ho- 



240 FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. [Serm. XIV. 



nour have prevailed over those of religion; that, if discourses 
and proceedings of a certain description be tranquilly submitted 
to, lasting dishonour and infamy, in the eyes of men, must ne- 
cessarily follow; that to forgive, through motives of religion, is 
nevertheless a stain of cowardice, which the world never par- 
dons, and that, on this point, honour acknowledges neither ex- 
ception nor privilege. 

What is this honour, my brethren, which is to be bought only 
at the price of our souls and of our eternal salvation? And how 
worthy of pity, if guilt alone can save from ignominy ! I know 
that it is here that the false laws of the world seem to prevail 
over those of religion; and that the wisest themselves, who ex- 
ecrate this abuse, are, however, of opinion that it must be sub- 
mitted to. But I speak before a Prince, who, wiser than the 
world, and filled with a just indignation against a madness so 
contrary to the maxims of the gospel, as well as to the interests 
of the state, hath shewn to his subjects what is the true honour, 
and who, in forcing criminal arms from their hands, hath mark- 
ed with lasting infamy those barbarous modes of revenge to 
which the public error had attached a deplorable glory. 

What, my brethren, an abominable maxim, which the barbar- 
ity of the first manners of our ancestors alone hath consecrated, 
and handed down to us, should prevail over all the rules of Chris- 
tianity, and all the most inviolable rules of the state ! It should 
be no dishonour to bathe your hands in your brother's blood, 
while it would be one to obey God, and the prince, who holds 
his place in the world! Glory would no longer then be but a 
madness, and cowardice but a noble respect for religion, and for 
our master. You dread passing for a coward ! Show your va- 
lour then by shedding your blood in the defence of your coun- 
try; go and brave dangers at the head of our armies; and there 
seek glory in the discharge of your duty; establish your repu- 
tation by actions worthy of being ranked among the memorable 
events of a reign so glorious; such is that valour which the 
state requires and which religion authorises. Then despise these 
brutal and personal vengeances; look upon them as a childish 
ostentation of valour, which is often used as a cover to actual 
cowardice; as the vile and vulgar refuge of those who have no- 
thing signal to establish their character; as a forced and an 
equivocal proof of courage, which the world wrests from us, and 
against which the heart often revolts. Far from imputing shame 
to you, the world itself will make it a fresh title of honour to you; 
you will be still more exalted in its opinion ; and you will teach 
your equals, that misplaced valour is nothing but a brutal fear; 
that wisdom and moderation ever attend true glory; that what- 
ever dishonours humanity can never do honour to men; and 
that the gospel, which inculcates and commands forgiveness, 
hath made more heroes than the world itself, which preaches 
up revenge. 



Serm. XIV.] FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. 



241 



You will perhaps say that these maxims do not regard you; 
that you hare forgotten all the subjects of complaint which you 
had against your brother; and that a reconciliation hath put an 
end to the eclat of your misunderstandings and of your quarrel. 
Now, I say, that it is more especially on this point that you 
are grossly deceived; and, after having shown to you the injus- 
tice of our hatreds, it is my duty now to prove to you the falsity 
of our reconciliations. 

Part II. There is not a precept in the law which leaves less 
room for doubt or for mistake, than that which obliges us to 
love our brethren; and, nevertheless, there is none upon which 
more illusions and false maxims are founded. In effect, there 
is not almost a person who doth not say, that he hath heartily 
forgiven his brother, and that his conscience is perfectly tran- 
quil on that head; and, nevertheless, nothing is more rare 
than sincere forgiveness, and there are few instances of a recon- 
cilement which changes the heart, and which is not merely a 
false appearance of renewed amity; whether it be considered in 
its principle, or whether the proceedings and consequences of it 
be examined. 

I say, in its principle; for, my brethren, in order that a re- 
conciliation be sincere and real, it is necessary that it take its 
source in charity, and in a Christian love of our brother. Now, 
human motives engross, in general, a work which can be the 
work of grace alone. A reconciliation takes place, in order not 
to persist against the pressing intreaties of friends; in order to 
avoid a certain disagreeable eclat, which would necessarily fol- 
low an open hostility, and which might revert upon ourselves; 
in order not to exclude ourselves from certain societies, from 
which we would be under the necessity of banishing ourselves 
were we obstinately to persist in being irreconcilable to our 
brother. A reconciliation takes place through deference to the 
great, who exact of us that compliance, in order to acquire a 
reputation for moderation and greatness of soul; in order to 
avoid giving transactions to the public which would not cor- 
respond with that idea which we would wish it to have of us; 
in order, at once, to cut short the continual complaints and the 
insulting discourses of an enemy, who knows us perhaps only 
too well, and who has once been too deep in our confidence, not 
to merit some caution and deference on our part, and that, by 
a reconciliation, we should endeavour to silence him. What 
more shall I say? We are reconciled perhaps like Saul, in or- 
der more securely to ruin our enemy, and to lull his vigilance 
and precautions. 

Such are, in general, the motives of those reconciliations 
which every day take place in the world, and what I say here 
is so true, that sinners who show no sign of piety on any other 
occasion, are, however, reconciled to their brethren in daily in- 

2 



242 



FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. [Seem. XIV. 



stances; and they who cannot prevail over themselves in the 
easiest duties of a Christian life, appear as heroes in the accom- 
plishment of this one, which, of all others, is the most difficult. 
Ah ! it is because they are heroes of vanity and not of charity : 
it is, that they leave that part of the reconciliation which alone 
is heroical and arduous in the sight of God, viz. an oblivion 
upon the past injury, and a total revolution of our heart towards 
our brother; and they retain of it only that part which is glori- 
ous in the sight of men, viz. an appearance of moderation, and 
a promptitude towards amity, which the world itself praises and 
admires. 

But, if the greatest part of reconciliations turn out to be false 
when these motives are examined, they are not less so if we 
consider them in their proceedings. Yes, my brethren, what 
measures and negociations ! What formalities and solicitudes in 
concluding them ! What attentions to bestow, and cautions to 
observe ! What interests to conciliate, obstacles to remove, and 
steps to accomplish ! Thus your reconciliation is not the work 
of charity, but of the wisdom and skill of your friends; it is a 
worldly affair; it is not a religious step; it is a treaty happily 
concluded; it is not a duty of faith fulfilled; it is the work of 
man, but it is not the deed of God: in a word, it is a peace 
which comes from the earth, it is not the peace of heaven. 

For, candidly, have men been able, through their arrange- 
ments and the ingenuity of their measures, in reconciling you 
with your brother, to revive that charity which was extinguish- 
ed in your heart? Have they been able to restore that treasure 
to you which you had lost? They have succeeded, indeed, in 
terminating the scandal of declared enmity, and in establishing 
between you and your brother the outward duties of society; 
but they have not changed your heart, which God alone can do; 
they have not extinguished that hatred, which grace alone can 
extinguish. You are therefore reconciled, but you still love 
not your brother; and, in effect, if you sincerely loved him, 
Would so many mediators have been required to reconcile you? 
Love is its own mediator and interpreter. Charity is that brief 
word which would have saved to your friends all those endless 
toils which they have been obliged to employ in order to re- 
claim you: it is not so measured; it frankly confesses what it 
sincerely feels. Now, before giving way, you have insisted 
upon a thousand conditions; you have disputed every step; you 
have been resolute in not going beyond a certain point; you have 
exacted that your brother should make the first advances to- 
wards meeting you. Charity knows nothing of all these rules; 
it hath only one, and that is, oblivion upon the injury, and to 
love our brother as ourself. 

I grant that certain prudential measures are to be observed, 
and that too hasty or ill-timed advances might often be not 
only unsuccessful, but even the means of hardening your bro- 



Serm. XIV.] FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. 



243 



ther still more against you. But I say that charity ought to 
regulate these measures, and not vanity; I say, and I repeat 
it, that all these reconciliations which are with such difficulty 
concluded, where hoth parties are resolute in yielding only to a 
certain point, and even that with precautions so strict and so 
precise; where so many expedients and so much mystery are 
necessary, — are the fruits of fleshly prudence; they correct the 
manners, hut they affect not the heart; they hring the persons, 
but not the affections nearer: they re-establish civilities, but 
leave the same sentiments; in a word, they terminate the scan- 
dal of hatred, but not the sin. Thus Jesus Christ plainly com- 
mands us to go our way and be reconciled to our brother. He 
says not to us, do not go too far, lest your brother take advan- 
tage by it; be first convinced that he will meet you half-way; 
seek not after him, lest he consider your proceedings as an apo- 
logy for his complaints, as a tacit acknowledgment of your 
blame, and a sentence pronounced against yourself. Jesus 
Christ plainly tells us: Go thy way and be reconciled to thy 
brother. He desires that the reconciliation take place through 
charity alone; he supposes, that, in order to love our brother, 
we have no occasion for mediators, and that our heart should 
be fully capable of every thing required without any foreign 
interference. 

Such are the steps of reconciliations; thence, the motives be- 
ing almost always human, the proceedings faulty, their conse- 
quences can be only vain and of no effect. I say the conse- 
quences; for, my brethren, in what do the far greater part of 
those reconciliations, which every day take place in the world, 
terminate? What is the fruit of them? What is it which is 
commonly called a reconciliation with our enemy? I shall ex- 
plain it to you. 

You say, in the first place, That you are reconciled to your 
brother, and that you have heartily forgiven him; but that 
you have taken your resolution to see him no more, and from 
henceforth to have no further intercourse with him: And, upon 
this footing, you live tranquil; you believe that nothing more is 
prescribed by the gospel, and that a confessor hath no title to 
demand more. Now, I declare that you have not forgiven your 
brother, and that you are still, with respect to him, in hatred, 
in death, and in sin. 

For I demand of you: Do we dread the sight of those we 
love? And, if your enemy be now your brother, what can there 
be so hateful and so disagreeable to you in his presence? You 
say that you have forgiven, and that you love him; but, in or- 
der to avoid all accidents, and that his presence may not arouse 
vexatious ideas, you find it more proper to exclude yourself 
from it. But what is that kind of love which the sole presence 
of the beloved object irritates against it, and inflames with ha- 
tred and wrath? You love him! That is to say, that perhaps 



2U FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. [Serm. XIV. 

you would not wish to injure, or to destroy him. But that is 
not enough; religion commands you likewise to love him: for 
honour, indolence, moderation, fear, and want of opportunity, 
are sufficient inducements to prevent you from injuring him; 
but you must be Christian to love him; and that is precisely 
what you are not willing to be. 

And, candidly, would you that God loved you, upon the 
condition that he should never see you? Would you be satisfied 
with his goodness, and with his mercy, were he for ever v to ba- 
nish you from his presence? For you well know that he will 
treat you, as you shall have treated your brother. Would you 
think yourself much in favour with the prince, were he to for- 
bid you ever to present yourself before him? You constantly 
say, that a man is in disgrace, when he is no longer permitted 
to appear before the master; and you pretend to persuade us 
that you love your brother, and that no rancour remains in 
your heart against him, while his sole presence displeases and 
irritates you. 

And what less equivocal mark can be given of animosity 
against your brother, than that of being unable to endure his 
presence? It is the very extreme of hatred and of rancour. For 
many settled hatreds exist, which yet are kept under a kind of 
check; are, as far as possible, concealed, and even borrow the 
outward semblance of friendship and of decency; and, though 
unable to reconcile the heart to duty, yet have sufficient com- 
mand over themselves, to preserve appearances to the world. 
But your hatred is beyond all restraint; it knows neither pru- 
dence, caution, nor decency; and you pretend to persuade us 
that it is now no more ! You still show the most violent proofs 
of animosity, and even these you would have us to consider as 
the indubitable signs of a Christian and sincere love ! 

But, besides, are Christians made to live estranged, and un- 
connected with each other? Christians! The members of one 
body, the children of the same Father, the disciples of the 
same Master, the inheritors of the same kingdom, the stones of 
the same building, the particles of the same mass ! Christians ! 
The participation of one same spirit, of one same redemption, 
of one same righteousness! Christians! Sprung from one bo- 
som, regenerated in the same water, incorporated in the same 
church, redeemed by one ransom, — are they made to fly each 
other, to make a punishment of seeing each other, and to be 
unable to endure each other? All religion binds, unites us to- 
gether; the sacraments in which we join, the public prayers 
and thanksgivings which we sing, the ceremonies of that wor- 
ship in which w^ pride ourselves, the assembly of believers at 
which we assist; all these externals are only symbols of that 
union which ties us together. All religion itself is but one holy 
society, a divine communication of prayers, of sacrifices, of 
work, and of well-doings. Every thing connects and unites 



Sebm. XIV.] FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. 



245 



us, every thing tends to make, of our brethren and of us, only 
one family, one body, one heart, and one soul; and you be- 
lieve that you love your brother, and that you preserve, with 
respect to him, all the most sacred ties of religion, while you 
break through even those of society, and that you cannot endure 
even his presence. 

I say much more: How shall you indulge the same hope 
with him? For, by that common hope, you are eternally to 
live with him, to make his happiness your own, to be happy 
with him, to be reunited with him in the bosom of God, and 
with him to sing the eternal praises of grace. Ah! How could 
the hope of being for ever united with him be the sweetest con- 
solation of your life, if it appear so desirable to live in separa- 
tion from him, and if you find even his presence a punish- 
ment? Renounce then the promises and all the hopes of faith; 
separate yourself as an accursed from the communion of believ- 
ers; interdict to yourself the altar and the awful mysteries; 
banish yourself from the assembly of the holy; no longer come 
there to offer up your gifts and yonr prayers, since all these 
religious duties, supposing you in union with your brother, be- 
come derisions, if you be not so; depose against you in the face 
of the altars; and proclaim to you to quit the holy assembly as 
a publican and a sinner. 

Perhaps, alarmed at these holy truths, you will finally tell 
us, that you will so far conquer yourself as to see your brother 
and to live on good terms with him; that you will not be wanting 
in civilities; but that, for the rest, you know where to stop, and 
that he need not reckon much upon your friendship. 

You will not be wanting in civilities! And that, my dear 
hearer, you believe, is to pardon and to be reconciled with your 
brother, and to love him as yourself? But that charity which 
the gospel commands is in the heart; it is not a simple decorum, 
a vain outside, a useless ceremony; it is real feeling, and an 
active love; it is a sincere tenderness, ever ready to manifest 
itself in actions, You love as a Jew and as a Pharisee, but you 
love not as a Christian and as a disciple of Jesus Christ. The 
law of charity is the law of the heart; it regulates the feelings, 
changes the inclinations, and pours the oil of peace and of leni- 
ty over the wounds of an angry and wounded will; and you turn 
it into a law wholly external, a pharisaical and superficial law, 
which regulates only the outside, which settles only the manners, 
and is fulfilled <by vain appearances. 

But you are not commanded that you shall merely refrain 
from wounding the rules of courtesy, and that you shall pay to 
your brother all those duties which society mutually imposes; it 
is the world which prescribes this law; these are its rules and cus- 
toms. But Jesus Christ commands you to love him; and, while 
your heart is estranged from him, it is of little importance that 
you keep up the vain externals of courtesy. You refuse to re- 



246 



FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. [Serm. XIV. 



ligion the essential part; and the only difference betwixt you 
and those sinners who persist in not seeing their brethren, is, 
that you know how to constrain yourself for the world, and you 
know not how to thwart yourself for salvation. 

And surely, my brethren, if men were united together by the 
sole ties of society, they no doubt would discharge their duty, 
by keeping up all the externals of politeness, and by maintaining 
that mutual commerce of cares, attentions, and courtesies, which 
constitute, as it were, the whole harmony of the body politic. 
But we are united together by the sacred and close ties of faith, 
of hope, of charity, and of religion. In the midst of the world 
we form a society wholly internal and holy, of which charity is 
the invisible bond, and altogether distinct from that civil socie- 
ty which legislators have established. Consequently, by ful- 
filling, with regard to your brethren, the external courtesies, 
you satisfy the claims which civil society hath upon you, but 
you do not fulfil those of religion; you disturb not the political 
order, but you overturn the order of charity; you are a peaceable 
citizen, but you are not a citizen of heaven: you are a man of 
the age, but you are not a man of the age to come; the world 
may acquit you, and demand no more, but what you do is a 
blank in the sight of God, because you are not in charity; and 
your condemnation is certain. Come and tell us, after this, 
that you will not be wanting in decorum, and that religion ex- 
acts no more of us. It exacts then only dissimulations, outsides, 
and vain appearances ! It exacts then nothing* true, nothing real, 
nothing which changes the heart! And the great precept of 
charity, which alone gives reality to all our works, would no 
longer then be but a false pretence and a vain hypocrisy! 

And trust not solely to us on this point; consult the public 
itself. See if, in spite of all the appearances which you still 
keep up with your brother, it be not an established opinion in 
the world that you love him not; and if the world do not act 
in consequence of that persuasion. See if your creatures, if all 
who approach and who are attached to you, do not affect to 
keep at a distance from your brother. See if all those who 
hate him, or who are in interests opposite to his, do not court 
your friendship and form closer ties with you, and if all those 
who are inimical to your brother do not profess themselves your 
friends. See if those who have favours to expect from you do 
not begin by forsaking him, and if they do not think that in so 
doing they are paying court to you. You see that the world 
knows you better than you know yourself; that it is not mis- 
taken in your real sentiments; and that, in spite of these vain 
shows towards your brother, you are actually in hatred and in 
death, and that in this respect the world itself is of our opinion; 
that world, which, on every other occasion, we have constantly 
to combat. 

Behold in what terminate the greatest part of the reconcilia- 



I 



Serm. XIV J FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES. 247 

tions which are every day made in the world. They once more 
see each other, but they are not re-united; they promise a mu- 
tual friendship, but it is never given; their persons meet, but 
their hearts are always estranged; and I had reason to say, that 
the hatreds are unchangeable, and that almost all the reconcilia- 
tions are mere pretences; that the injury may be forgiven, but 
that the offender is never loved; that they may cease to treat 
their brother as an enemy, but that they never regard him as a 
brother. 

And, behold what takes place every day before our eyes. In 
the world are to be seen public characters, families of illustrious 
names, who still preserve with each other certain measures of 
decency, which they cannot indeed break through without scan- 
dal; yet, nevertheless, live in different interests, in public and 
avowed sentiments of envy, of jealousy, and of mutual animo- 
sity; thwart and do every thing in their power to ruin each 
other, view each other with the most jealous eyes and make all 
their creatures partizans in their resentments and aversions; 
divide the world, the court, and the city; interest the public in 
their quarrel, and establish in the world the opinion and the 
scandal that they hate each other; that they would mutually 
destroy each other; that they still, it is true, keep up appear- 
ances; but that, at bottom, their interests and affections are 
for ever estranged. Yet, notwithstanding all this each party 
lives in a reputation of piety, and of the practice of good 
works; they have distinguished and highly esteemed confes- 
sors; in mutually discharging to each other certain duties, yet 
living otherwise in a public and avowed hostility, they frequent 
the sacraments, they are continually in the intercourse of holy 
things, they coolly approach the altar, they frequently and 
without scruple present themselves at the penitential tribunal, 
where, far from confessing their hatred before the Lord, and 
weeping over the scandal with which it afflicts the people, they 
make fresh complaints against their enemy; they accuse him, 
in place of accusing themselves; they make a boast of the vain 
external duties which they pay to him, and allege them as 
marks of the heart not being rancorous. What shall I say? 
And the very ministers of penitence, who should have been the 
judges of our hatred, frequently become its apologists, adopt a 
party with the public, enter into all the animosity and preju- 
dices of their penitents, proclaim the justice of their quarrel, 
and are the cause that the only remedy destined to strike at the 
root of the evil, answers no other purpose than that of decora- 
ting it with the appearances of godliness, and of rendering it 
more incurable. 

Great God! Thou alone canst close the wounds which a 
proud sensibility hath made in my heart, by nourishing unrea- 
sonable and iniquitous hatreds which have corrupted it in thy 
sight. Enable me to forget fleeting and momentary injuries, 



248 THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. [Serm. XV. 



in order that thou may forget the crimes of my whole life. Is 
it for me, O my God ! to be so feeling and so inexorable to 
the slightest insults, I who have such necessity for thy mercy 
and indulgence? Are the injuries of which I complain to 
be compared with those with which I have a thousand times 
dishonoured thy supreme grandeur! Must the worm of the 
earth be irritated and inflamed at the smallest marks of disdain, 
while thy sovereign majesty hath so long, and with so much 
goodness endured his rebellions and his offences? 

Who am I, to be so keen upon the interests of my glory; I 
who dare not in thy presence cast mine eyes upon my secret 
ignominy; I who would deserve to be the reproach of men, and 
the outcast of my people; I who have nothing praiseworthy, 
according even to the world, but the good fortune of having con- 
cealed from it my infamies and my weaknesses; I to whom the 
most biting reproaches would still be too gentle, and would treat 
me with too much indulgence; I, in a word, who have no salva- 
tion now to hope, if thou forget not thine own glory, which I 
have so often insulted. 

But no, great God ! thy glory is in pardoning the sinner, and 
mine shall be in forgiving my brother. Accept, O Lord, this 
sacrifice which I make to thee of my resentments. Estimate 
not its value by the puerility and the slightness of the injuries 
which I forget, but by that pride which had magnified them, 
and had rendered me so feeling to them. And, seeing thou hast 
promised to forgive us our trespasses whenever we shall have 
forgiven the trespasses of our brethren, fulfil, O Lord, thy pro- 
mises. It is in this hope that I presume to reckon upon thine 
eternal mercies. 



SERMON XV. 
THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 
Luke vii. 37. 

And behold a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that 
Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house brought an alabaster-box of 
ointment, and stood at his feet behind Kim weeping, and began to wash 
his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and 
kissed them, and anointed them with the ointment. 

From such abundant tears, so sincere a confusion, and a pro- 
ceeding so humiliating and uncommon, it may easily be com- 



Serm. XV.] THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 249 



preb ended how great must once have been the influence of the 
passions over the heart of this sinner, and what grace now 
operateth within her. Palestine had long beheld her as the 
shame and the reproach of the city; the Pharisee's household 
news her to-day as the glory of grace and a model of penitence: 
What a change, and what a spectacle ! 

This soul, fettered but a moment ago, with the most shame- 
ful and the most indissoluble chains, finds nothing now capa- 
ble of stopping her; and without hesitation, she flies to seek, at 
the feet of Jesus Christ, her salvation and deliverance: this 
soul, hitherto plunged in the senses, and living totally for vo- 
luptuousness, in a moment sacrifices their liveliest charms and 
their dearest ties; this soul, lastly, impatient till then of every 
yoke, and whose heart had never acknowledged other rule than 
the caprice of its inclination, commences her penitence by the 
most humiliating proceedings and the most melancholy subjec- 
tions. How admirable, O my God, are the works of thy grace ! 
And how near to its cure is the most hopeless wretchedness 
when once it becomes the object of thine infinite mercies ! And 
how rapid and shortened are the ways by which thou conductest 
thy chosen. 

But whence comes it, my brethren, that such grand examples 
make so trifling an impression upon us? From two prejudices, 
apparently the most opposite to each other, yet, nevertheless, 
which proceed from the same principle, and lead to the same 
error. 

The first is, that we figure to ourselves that conversion of the 
heart required by God as merely a cessation of guilt, the ab- 
staining from certain excessive irregularities, which even de- 
cency itself holds out as improper. And, as we are at last 
brought to that, either by age, new situations, or even our own 
inclinations, which time alone has changed, we never think of 
going farther; we believe that all is completed, and we listen to 
the history of the most affecting conversions, held out to us by 
the church, as to lessons which no longer, in any degree, regard 
us. 

The second goes to another extreme: we represent Christian 
penitence to ourselves, as a horrible situation, and the despair 
of human weakness; a state without comfort or consolation, 
and attended by a thousand duties, every one more disgusting 
than another to the heart; and, repulsed through the error of 
that gloomy image, the examples of a change find us little dis- 
posed to be affected, because they always find us discouraged. 

Now, the conversion of our sinner confutes these two preju- 
dices, so dangerous to salvation. ] st. Her penitence not only 
terminates her errors, it likewise expiates and makes reparation 
for them. 2dly. Her penitence begins, it is true, her tears and 
her sorrow; but it is likewise the commencement to her of new 
pleasures. Wbatever she had despoiled Jesus Christ of in her 



250 THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINN1ER. [Seem. XV. 



errors, she restores to him in her penitence : behold their re- 
paration! but with Jesus Christ she finds, in her penitence, 
that peace in those comforts which she had never experienced 
in her errors : behold their consolations ! The reparations, and 
the consolations of her penitence are the whole history of her 
conversion, and the subject of this discourse. 

Part I. The office of penitence, says St Augustin, is that 
of establishing order wherever sin hath introduced corruption. 
It is false, if it be not universal; for order solely results from a 
perfect subordination of all desires and emotions which spring 
up in our hearts; every thing must be in its place, in order that 
that divine harmony, which sin had disturbed, may be restored; 
and, while the smallest particular there remains deranged, in 
vain do you labour to repair the rest ; you only rear up an edi- 
fice, which, being improperly arranged, is continually giving way 
in some of its parts, and confusion and disorder prevail through 
the whole. 

Now, behold the important instruction held out to us in the 
conversion of this sinner! Her sin comprised several disorders: 
1st. An iniquitous use of her heart, which had never been taken 
up but with creatures: 2dly. A criminal abuse of all natural 
gifts, which she had made the instruments of her passions: 
3dly. A shameful abasement of her senses, which she had al- 
ways made to contribute to her voluptuousness and ignominy: 
Lastly, A universal scandal in the notoriety of her errors. 
Her penitence makes reparation for all these disorders : all, con- 
sequently, are forgiven; for nothing is neglected in the repent- 
ance. 

I say, 1st. An iniquitous use of her heart. Yes, my brethren, 
every love, which has for object only the creature, degrades 
our heart: it is a disorder to love, for itself that which can nei- 
ther be our happiness nor our perfection, nor, consequently, our 
ease. For to love, is to seek our felicity in that which we love; 
it is the hope of finding, in the object beloved, whatever is want- 
ing to our heart; it is the calling it in aid against that shocking 
void which we feel within ourselves, in the confidence that they 
shall be able to fill it: to love, is to look upon the object be- 
loved as our resource against all our wants, the cure of all our 
evils, and the author of all our good. Now, as it is in God 
alone that we can find all these advantages, it is a disorder, and 
a debasement of the heart, to seek for them in a vile creature. 

And, at bottom, we feel sensibly ourselves the injustice of 
that love: however passionate it be, we quickly discover, in the 
creatures which inspire it, weaknesses and defects which render 
them unworthy of it: we soon find them out to be unjust, fanci- 
ful, false, vain and inconstant; the deeper we examine them, 
the more we say to ourselves, that our heart has been deceived, 
and that this is not the object which it sought. Our reason in- 



Serm. XV.] THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 251 



wardly blushes at the weakness of our passion; we no longer 
submit to our chains, but with pain; our passion becomes our 
burden and our punishment. But, punished without being un- 
deceived in our error, we seek, in a change, a remedy for our 
mistake: we wander from object to object, as if some one at 
last chance to fix us, it is not that we are satisfied with our 
choice, it is that we are tired of our inconstancy. 

Our sinner had wandered in these ways: iniquitous loves had 
been the cause of all her misfortunes and of all her crimes; 
and, born to love God alone, he alone it was whom she had* ne- 
ver loved. But scarcely hath she known him, says the gospel, 
when, blushing at the meanness of her former passions, she no 
longer acknowledges but him alone to be worthy of her heart; 
all in the creature appears to her empty, false, and disgusting: 
far from finding those charms, from which her heart had for- 
merly with such difficulty defended itself, she no longer sees 
in them but their frivolity, their danger, and their vanity. — 
The Lord alone, in her sight, appears good, real, faithful, con- 
stant to his promises, magnificent in his gifts, true in his affec- 
tions, indulgent even in his anger, alone sufficiently great, to 
fill the whole immensity of our heart ; alone sufficiently powerful 
to satisfy all its desires; alone sufficiently generous to soften all 
its distresses; alone immortal, and who shall for ever be loved: 
lastly, to love whom can be followed by the sole repentance of 
having loved him too late. 

It is love, therefore, my brethren, which makes true peni- 
tence: For penitence is only a changing of the heart; and the 
heart does not change but in changing its love: penitence is 
only the re-establisment of order in man; and man is only in 
order when he loves the Lord, for whom he is made; penitence 
is only a reconciliation with God; and your reconciliation is 
fictitious, if you do not restore to him your heart; in a word, 
penitence obtains the remission of sins, and sins are remitted 
only in proportion to our love. 

Tell us no more, then, my brethren, when we hold out these 
grand examples for your imitation, that you do not feel your- 
selves born for devotion, and that your heart is of such a nature 
that every thing which is denominated piety is disagreeable to 
it. What ! my dear hearer, you heart is not made for loving 
its God? Your heart is not made for the Creator who hath 
given it to you? What ! You are born then for vanity and false- 
hood? Your heart, so grand, so exalted, and which nothing 
here below can satisfy, has been bestowed on you solely for 
pleasures which weary you; creatures which deceive you; ho- 
nours which embarrass you; a world which tires or disgusts 
you? God alone, for whom you are made, and who hath made 
you what you are, should find nothing for himself in the principle 
of your being: Ah! You are unjust towards your own heart: 
You know not yourself, and you take your corruption for your- 



252 THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. [Serm. XV. 



self. And in effect, if not born for virtue, what then is the 
melancholy mystery of your lot? For what are you born? What 
chimera then are you among men? You are born then only 
for remorse and gloomy care? The author of your being hath 
drawn you from nonentity, only to render you miserable? You 
are gifted then with a heart, only to pursue a happiness which 
either is visionary or which flies from you, and to be a continual 
burden to yourself? 

O man ! open here thine eyes ; fathom to the bottom the des- 
tiny of thy heart, and thou wilt acknowledge that these tur- 
bulent passions, which fill thee with such repugnancies to virtue, 
are foreign to thy nature; that such is not the natural state of 
thy heart; that the author of nature and of grace hath bestowed 
on thee a more sublime lot; that thou wert born for order, for 
righteousness, and for innocence; that thou hast corrupted a 
happy nature, by turning it towards iniquitous passions ! and 
that, if not born for virtue, we know not what thou art, and 
thou becomest incomprehensible to thyself. 

But you are mistaken, when you consider, as inclinations 
incompatible with piety, those warm propensities towards plea- 
sure which are born with you. From the instant that grace 
shall have sanctified them, they will become dispositions favour- 
able for salvation. The more you are animated in the pursuit 
of the world and its false pleasures, the more eager shall you 
be for the Lord, and for true riches; the more you have been 
found tender and feeling by creatures, the easier shall be the 
access of grace to your heart: in proportion as your nature is 
haughty, proud, and aspiring - , the more shall you serve the Lord, 
without fear, without disguise, without meanness: the more 
your character now appears easy, light, and inconsistent, the 
easier it will be for you to detach yourself from your criminal 
attachments, and to return to your God. Lastly, your passions 
themselves, if I may venture to speak in this manner, will be- 
come the means of facilitating your penitence. Whatever had 
been the occasion of your destruction, you will render it condu- 
cive towards your salvation; you will see and acknowledge, 
that to have received a tender, faithful, and generous heart, is 
to have been born for piety, and that a heart which creatures 
have been able to touch, holds out great and favourable dispo- 
sitions towards grace. 

Peruse what remains to us of the history of the just, and you 
will see that those who have at the first been dragged away by 
mad passions, who were born with every talent calculated for 
the world, with the warmest propensities towards pleasures, 
and the most opposite to every thing pious, have been those in 
whom grace hath operated the most wonderful change. And, 
without mentioning the sinner of our gospel, the Augustins, 
the Pelagiuses, the Fabioleses, those worldly and dissipated souls, 
so obstinate and rooted in their debaucheries, and so diametri- 



Serm. XV.] THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 253 



cally opposite, it would seem, to piety; what progress have 
they not since made in the ways of God? And their former pro- 
pensities, have, as I may say, only paved the way for their pe- 
nitence. The same soil which nourishes and produces great 
passions, gives birth likewise to the greatest virtues, when it 
pleases the Lord to change the heart. My God! Thou hast 
made us all for thee; and, in the incomprehensible arrangement 
of thy Providence, and of thy mercy towards man, even our 
weaknesses are to produce towards our sanctification. It is thus 
that our sinner made reparation for the iniquitous use which she 
had made of her heart. 

But, 2dly, The love which she had for Jesus Christ was not 
one of those vain and indolent sensibilities which are rather the 
natural emotions of an easily affected heart than real impressions 
of grace, and which never produce any thing in us farther than 
that of rendering us satisfied with ourselves and persuading us 
that our heart is changed: the sacrifices, and not the feelings, 
prove the reality of love. 

Thus, the second disorder of her sin having been the crimi- 
nal and almost universal abuse of all creatures; the second re- 
paration of her penitence, is the rigorously abstaining from all 
those things which she had abused in her errors. Her hair, 
her perfumes, the gifts of body and of nature, had been the in- 
struments of her pleasures; for none is ignorant of the use to 
which a deplorable passion can apply them; this is the first 
step of her penitence: the perfumes are abandoned, and even 
consecrated to a holy ministry: her hair is neglected, and no 
longer serves but to wipe the feet of her deliverer; beauty, and 
every attention to the body are neglected, and her eyes are 
blinded with tears. Such are the first sacrifices of her love: 
she is not contented with giving up cares visibly criminal, she 
even sacrifices such as might have been looked upon as inno- 
cent, and thinks, that the properest way of punishing the abuse 
she had formerly made of them, is by depriving herself of the 
liberty she might still have had of employing them. 

In effect, by having once abused them, the sinner loses the 
right he had over them: what is permitted to an innocent soul, 
is no longer so to him who has been so unhappy as to deviate 
from the right path: Sin renders us, as it were, anathematised 
to all creatures around us, and which the Lord had destined to 
our use. Thus, there are rules for an unfaithful soul, not 
made for other men: he no longer enjoys, as I may say, the 
common right, and he must no more judge of his duties by 
the general maxims, but by the personal exceptions which con- 
cern him. 

Now, upon this principle, you are continually demanding of 
us, if the use of such and such an artifice in dress be a crime? 
If such and such public pleasures be forbidden? I mean not 
here to decide for others; but I ask at you who maintain their 



254 THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. [Serm. XV. 



innocency, whether you have never made a bad use of them ? 
Have you never made these cares of the body, these amuse- 
ments, and these artifices instrumental towards iniquitous pas- 
sions? Have you never employed them in corrupting hearts, or 
in nourishing the corruption of your own? What! Your entire 
life has perhaps been one continued and deplorable chain of 
passions and evils; you have abused every thing around you, 
and have made them instrumental to your irregular appetites; 
you have called them all in aid to that unfortunate tendency of 
your heart; your intentions have even exceeded your evil; 
your eye hath never been single, and you would willingly never 
have had that of others to have been so with regard to you; all 
your care for your person have been crimes; and when there 
is question of returning to your God, and of making reparation 
for a whole life of corruption and debauchery, you pretend to 
dispute with him for vanities, of which you have always made 
so infamous a use? You pretend to maintain the innocency of 
a thousand abuses, which, though permitted to the rest of men, 
would be forbidden to you? You enter into contestation, when 
it is intended to restrict you from the criminal pomps of the 
world : You, to whom the most innocent, if such there be, are 
forbidden in future, and whose only dress ought henceforth to 
be sackcloth and ashes? Can you still pretend to justify cares 
which are your inward shame, and which have so often covered 
you with confusion at the feet of the sacred tribunal? And 
should so much contestation and so many explanations be re- 
quired, where your own shame alone should amply suffice? 

Besides, the holy sadness of piety no longer looks upon, but 
with horror, that which has once been a stumbling-block to us. 
The contrite soul examines not whether he may innocently in- 
dulge in it; it suffices for him to know, that it has a thousand 
times been the rock upon which he has seen his innocence split. 
Whatever has been instrumental in leading him to his evils, be- 
comes equally odious in his sight as the evils themselves; what- 
ever has been assisting to his passions, he equally detests as the 
passions themselves; whatever, in a word, has been favourable 
to his crimes, becomes criminal in his eyes. Should it even 
happen that he might be disposed to accord it to his weakness, 
ah ! his zeal, his compunction, would reject the indulgence, 
and would adopt the interests of God's righteousness against 
men; he could not prevail upon himself to permit abuses, which 
would be the means of recalling to him his past disorders; he 
would always entertain a dread that the same manner of acting 
might recal the same dispositions, and that, engrossed by the 
same cares, his heart would find itself the same; the sole image 
of his past infidelities disturbs and alarms him; and, far from 
bearing about with him their sad remains, he would wish to 
have it in his power to remove even from the spots, and to tear 
himself from the occupations, which renew their remembrance. 



Serm. XV.] THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 255 



And, surely, what kind of a penitence must that be which 
still permits us to love all those things which have been the 
occasion of our greatest crimes? And, while yet dripping from 
a shipwreck, can we too strenuously form the resolution of for- 
ever shunning those rocks upon which Ave had so lately split? 

Lastly, true penitence causes us to find everywhere matter 
of a thousand invisible sacrifices. It does not confine itself to 
certain essential privations; every thing which flatters the 
passions, every thing which nourishes the life of the senses, 
every superfluity which tends solely to the gratification of self- 
love, all these become the subject of its sacrifices; and, like a 
sharp and grievous sword, it everywhere makes divisions and 
separations painful to the heart, and cuts, even to the quick, 
whatever in the smallest degree approached too near to the cor- 
ruption of our propensities. The grace of compunction at once 
leads the contrite soul to this point; it renders him ingenuous 
in punishing himself, and arranges matters so well that every 
thing serves in expiation of his crimes; that duties, social in- 
tercourse, honours, prosperity, and the cares attendant upon 
his station, become opportunities of proving his merit; and that 
even his pleasures, through the circumspection and faith with 
which they are accompanied, become praiseworthy and virtu- 
ous actions. 

Behold the divine secret of penitence! As it officiates here 
below towards the criminal soul, says Tertullian, as the justice 
of God; and as the justice of God shall one day punish guilt 
by the eternal privation of all creatures which the sinner hath 
abused, penitence anticipates that terrible judgment; it every- 
where imposes on itself the most rigorous privations; and if 
the miserable condition of human life render the use of present 
things still requisite, it employs them much less to flatter than 
to punish the senses, by the sober and austere manner in which 
it applies them. 

You have only to calculate thereupon the truth of your peni- 
tence. In vain do you appear to have left off the brutal gratifi- 
cation of the passions, if the same pomp and splendour are re- 
quisite towards satisfying that natural inclination which courts 
distinction through a vain magnificence; the same profusions, 
in consequence of not having the courage to deprive self-love of 
accustomed superfluities; the same pleasures of the world, in 
consequence of being unable to do without it; the same advan- 
tages on the part of fortune, in consequence of the continual 
desire of rising superior to others: in a word, if you can part 
with nothing, you excluded yourself from nothing; even admit- 
ting that all those attachments which you still preserve should 
be absolute crimes, your heart is not penitent, your man- 
ners are apparently different, but all your passions are still the 
same; you are apparently changed, but you are not converted, 
How rare, my brethren, are true penitents ! How common are 



256 THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. [Serm.XV. 



vain and superficial conversions ! And how many souls, chan- 
ged in the eyes of the world, shall one day find themselves the 
same before God! 

But it is not enough to have attained to that degree of self- 
denial which keeps us without the circle of attraction of the 
allurements of guilt ; those laborious atonements must likewise 
be added, which wash out its stains. Thus, in the third place, 
the sinner of our gospel is not contented with having sacrificed 
her hair and her perfumes to Jesus Christ; she prostrates her- 
self at his feet, she washes them with her tears, she wipes, she 
kisses them: and, as the third disorder of her sins had been a 
shameful subjection of her senses, she begins the reparation 
of these criminal lewdnesses, by the humiliation and disgust of 
these lowly services. 

New instruction: It is not sufficient to remove from the 
passions those allurements which incite them; it is likewise 
necessary that laborious exertions of such virtues as are most 
opposite to them, insensibly repress, and recal them, to duty 
and order. You were fond of gaming, pleasures, amusements, 
and every thing which composes a worldly life; it is doing little 
to cut off from these pleasures that portion which may still con- 
duct to guilt ; if you wish that the love of the world be extin- 
guished in your heart, it is necessary that prayer, retirement, 
silence, and acts of charity, succeed to these dissolute man- 
ners; and that, not satisfied with shunning the crimes of the 
world, you likewise fly from the world itself. By giving your- 
self up to boundless and shameful passions, you have fortified 
the empire of the senses and of the flesh; it is necessary that 
fasting, watching, the yoke of ' mortification, gradually extin- 
guish these impure fires, weaken these tendencies, become un- 
governable through a long indulgence of voluptuousness, and 
not only remove guilt from you, but operate, as I may say, to 
dry up its source in your heart. Otherwise, by sparing, you 
only render yourself more miserable: the old attachments 
which you shall have broken without having weakened, and, 
as it were, rooted them from your heart by mortification, will 
incessantly be renewing their attacks; your passions, become 
more violent and impetuous by being checked and suspended, 
without your having weakened and overcome them, will make 
you undergo agititations and storms, such as you had never ex- 
perienced even in guilt: you will behold yourself on the point, 
every moment, of a melancholy shipwreck; you will never taste 
of peace in this new life. " You will find yourself more weak, 
more exhausted, more animated for pleasure, more easy to be 
shaken, and more disgusted with the service of God, in this 
state of imperfect penitence, than you had even been formerly 
in the midst of dissipation: every thing will become a rock to 
you; you will be a continual temptation to yourself; you will 
be astonished to find within you a still greater repugnance to 



Serm. XV.] THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 257 



duties; and, as it is hardly possible to stand out long against 
yourself, you will soon become disgusted with a virtue by which 
you suffer so much; and, in consequence of your having wished 
to be only a tranquil and mitigated penitent, you will be an un- 
happy one, without consolation, without peace, and, consequent- 
ly, without perseverance. To augment and multiply the sacri- 
fices is to abridge the sufferings in virtue; and, whatever we 
are induced to spare to the passions, becomes rather the punish- 
ment and the disgust, than the softening of our penitence. 

The last disorder which had accompanied the sin of the wo- 
man of our gospel, was the publicity of the scandal attending 
the corruption of her conduct. The scandal of the law, which 
was dishonoured in the opinion of the Romans and of so many 
other Gentiles, spread throughout Palestine, and who, witnessing 
the ill-conduct of our sinner, took occasion, no doubt, from it, 
to blaspheme the name of the Lord, to despise the sanctity of 
his law, to harden themselves in their impious superstitions, 
and to look upon the hope of Israel and the wonders of God, 
as related in the holy books, as fictions invented to amuse a 
credulous people. 

Scandal of place: Her ill-conduct had been conspicuous in 
the city, that is to say, in the capital of the country; from 
whence the report of such accidents was soon circulated through- 
out Judea. Now, behold the scandals for which her penitence 
makes reparation! the scandal of the law, by renouncing the 
superstitious traditions of the Pharisees, who had adulterated 
their precepts; and by confessing Jesus Christ, who was the 
end and the fulfilment of them. For, too frequently, after hav- 
ing dishonoured religion in the minds of the impious, through 
our excesses and scandalous conduct, we again dishonour it 
through our pretended piety; we create for ourselves a kind of 
virtue altogether worldly, superficial, and pharisaieal; we be- 
come superstitious without becoming penitent; we make the 
abuses of devotion succeed to those of the world; the only re- 
paration we make for the scandal of our debaucheries, is that 
of a sensual piety; and we reflect more disgrace upon virtue, 
through the weaknesses and the illusions which we mingle with 
it, than we did by our open and avowed excesses. Thus the 
impious are more hardened in their iniquity, and more removed 
from conversion, by the example of our false penitence, than 
ever they had formerly been by the example even of our vices. 

Lastly, the scandal of place : That same city which had been 
the theatre of her shame and of her crimes, becomes that of her 
penitence. She goes not into retired places to give vent to her 
sorrows and her tears; she takes no advantage, like Nicodemus, 
of the shades of night to come to Jesus Christ, nor waits the 
opportunity of his being in a retired corner of the city, in order 
to conceal from the eyes of the public the first steps of her con- 
version. In the face of that great city which she had scandal- 
it 



258 THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. [Serm. XV. 



ized by her conduct, she enters into the house of the pharisee, 
and is not afraid of submitting to have, as spectators of her pen- 
itence, those who had been witnesses of her former crimes. 
For, often, after having despised the world's opinion in debauch- 
ery, it becomes dreaded in virtue: the eyes of the public did 
not appear formidable to us during our dissipation : they become 
so in our penitence; our vices are carelessly laid open to view; 
our virtues are backward and cautious: we dare not at first de- 
clare openly for Jesus Christ; we are ashamed to show ourselves 
in a light so new to us ; we have gloried in vice as if it had been 
a virtue, and we blush for being virtuous, as though it were a 
shame. 

As our fortunate sinner had not been timid in evil, so she is 
not timid in good; she bears, even with a holy insensibility, the 
reproaches of the pharisee, who recounts, in the presence of all 
the guests, the infamy of her past manners. For the world, ty- 
pified by that pharisee, feels a gratification in the mean pleasure 
of recalling the former errors of those whom grace hath touch- 
ed: far from reaping any edification from their present good 
conduct, it is continually dwelling upon their past irregular- 
ity; it tides to weaken the merit of what they now do, by re- 
newing upon every occasion the remembrance of what they have 
done; it would appear that the errors which they lament au- 
thorize those which we love, and in which we still continue to 
live; and that it is more allowable for us to be sinners, since 
real and sincere penitents repent of having been so. It is thus, 
O my God! that every thing worketh out our destruction, and 
that, instead of blessing and praising the riches of thy mercy 
when thou withdrawest worldly and dissolute souls from the 
ways of perdition, and instead of being excited, by these grand 
examples, to have recourse to thy clemency, always so ready 
to receive the repentant sinner ; insensible and blind to Ids peni- 
tence, we are occupied only in recalling his errors, as if we were 
entitled from thence to say to ourselves, that we have nothing 
to dread in debauchery ; that one day or other we shall likewise 
become contrite; and that the sincerest penitents having once 
been perhaps still more deeply involved than we in mad passions, 
we need not despair of one day or other being able to quit them 
as well as they ! O inexplicable blindness of man, that finds 
inducements to debauchery even in the examples of penitence ! 

Such were the reparations of our sinner. But, if it be an er- 
ror to represent to ourselves a change of life as the simple ces- 
sation of our former debaucheries, without adding to that those 
expiations which wash them out; it is likewise another not less 
dangerous, the considering these expiations as involving you in 
sl situation, gloomy, wretched, and hopeless. Thus, after having 
mentioned to you the reparations of her penitence, it is proper 
that I now lav before vou the consolations. 



Seem. XV.] THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 259 



Part II. Come unto me, says Jesus Christ, all ye who are 
weary of the ways of iniquity; take my yoke upon you and learn 
of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest 
unto your souls; for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. 

This promise, addressed to all criminal souls, who are always 
miserable in debauchery, is completely fulfilled in the instance 
of the sinner of our gospel. In effect, every thing which had 
formerly been to her, in her dissipations, an inexhaustible fund 
of disgust, becomes now, in her penitence, a fruitful source of 
consolation; and with Jesus Christ she is happy, through the 
same means which, during her guilt, had occasioned all her 
miseries. 

Yes, my brethren, an iniquitous love had been her first guilt, 
and the first source of all her distresses; the first consolation of 
her penitence is a holy dilection for Jesus Christ, and the wide 
difference between that divine and new love, and the profane 
love which had hitherto engrossed her heart. I say the differ- 
ence in the object, in the proceedings, and in the correspon- 
dence. 

In the object: The depravity of her heart had attached her to 
men, corrupted, inconstant, deceitful, rather companions of her 
debauchery than real friends, less watchful to render her happy 
than attentive to the gratification of their own inordinate pas- 
sions; to men, who always join contempt to a gratified passion; 
to Ammons, in whose eyes, from the moment that they have 
obtained their wishes, the unfortunate object of their love be- 
comes vile and hateful; to men, whose weaknesses, artifices, 
transports, and defects, she well knew, and whom she inwardly 
acknowledged to be unworthy of her heart, and to whom she paid 
any attention, more through the unfortunate bias of passion, 
than the free choice of her reason; in a word, to men, who had 
never yet been able to fix the natural instability and love of 
change of her heart. Her penitence attaches her to Jesus 
Christ, the model of all virtue, the source of all grace, the prin- 
ciple of all light; the more she studies him, the more does she 
discover his greatness and sanctity; the more she loves him, the 
more does she find him worthy of being loved: to Jesus Christ, 
the faithful, immortal, and disinterested friend of her soul, who 
is concerned for her eternal interests alone; who is interested 
only in what may render her happy; who is even come to sacri- 
fice his ease, his glory and his life, in order to secure her im- 
mortal happiness; who has distinguished her from among so 
many women of Judah, by an overflowing of mercy, when she 
had rendered herself the most conspicuous of her sex, by the ex- 
cess of her wretchedness; who expects nothing from her, but is 
willing to bestow on her far more than she could ever have 
hoped; lastly, ta Jesus Christ, who has tranquillized her heart, 
by purifying it; who has fixed its inconstancy, and subdued the 
multiplicity of its desires; who has filled the whole extent of 



260 THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. [Sjbem. XV. 



her love; who has restored to her that internal peace which 
creatures had never heen able to bestow. 

O my soul ! How long shalt thou continue to love, in crea- 
tures, what is but thine affliction and punishment. Wouldst 
thou suffer more by breaking asunder thy chains, than thou 
now dost in bearing them? Would virtue and innocence be 
more painful than those shameful passions which at present 
debase and rend thee? All! Thou shalt find every thing light 
and easy, in comparison with the cruel agitations which render 
thee so unhappy in guilt. Difference in the object of her love. 

Difference in the steps. The excess of passion had led her 
to a thousand steps, in opposition to her inclination, her glory, 
and her reason : had led her to make a sacrifice to men of her 
quiet, her inclinations, her honour, and her liberty; to shame- 
ful condescensions and disagreeable submissions; to important 
sacrifices, for which the only return was their thinking them- 
selves more entitled from thence to exact still more: for such 
is the ingratitude of men; the more you allow them to become 
masters of your heart, the more they erect themselves its ty- 
rant: in their opinion, the excess of your attachment to them 
diminishes its merit; and they punish you for the fervour and 
the shame of your transports, by taking occasion, even from 
thence, to suffer all, eA^en to their gratitude, to be cooled. 

Behold the ungrateful returns experienced by our sinner in 
the ways of the passions ! But in her penitence every thing is 
reckoned : the slightest step which she takes for Jesus Christ is 
noticed, is praised, is defended by Jesus Christ himself. The 
pharisee vainly endeavours to lessen her merit, (for the world 
never studies but to diminish the value of the just;) the Saviour 
undertakes her defence; " Seest thou this woman?" said he to 
him, as he thereby meant to say, Knowest thou all the merit 
of the sacrifices which she makes to me, and how far the strength 
and the excess of her love for me extend? She hath not ceased 
to wash my feet with tears, and to wipe them with the hairs of 
her head. He reckons, he observes every thing; a sigh, a tear, 
a simple movement of the heart; nothing is lost upon him of 
whatever is done for him; nothing escapes the exactness of his 
glances, and the tenderness of his heart; we are well assured 
that we serve no ungrateful master; he overvalues even the 
slightest sacrifices. " Seest thou this woman?" He would, it 
appears, that all men view her with the same eyes that he did: 
that all men should be as equitable estimators as himself of her 
love, and of her tears: he no longer sees her debaucheries.; he 
forgets a whole life of error and guilt; he sees only her repent- 
ance and her tears. 

Now, what consolation for a contrite soul to have it in her 
power to say to herself, Till now, I have lived only for error 
and vanity; my days, my years, my cares, my inquietudes, my 
distresses, are all hitherto lost, and no longer exist, even in the 



Serm. XV.] THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 261 



memory of those men for whom alone I have lived, for whom 
alone I have sacrificed everything; my rectitude, my attentions, 
my anxieties, have never been repaid but with ingratitude; but 
henceforth, whatever I do for Jesus Christ will receive its full 
estimation; my sufferings, my afflictions, the slightest sacrifices 
of my heart; my sighs, my tears, which I had so often shed in 
vain for creatures, all shall be written in immortal characters in 
the book of life: all these shall eternally exist in the remem- 
brance of that faithful Master whom I serve; all these, in spite 
of the defects mingled with them by my weakness and my cor- 
ruption, shall be excused, and even purified through the grace 
of my Redeemer; and he will crown his gifts by rewarding my 
feeble deserts: I no longer live but for eternity; I no longer 
labour in vain; my days are real, my life is no longer a dream. 
O my brethren, what a blessed gain is piety ! And how great are 
the consolations which a soul recalled to Jesus Christ receives, 
in compensation for the trifling losses which he sacrifices to 
him! 

Lastly, Difference in the certitude of the correspondence. 
That love of creatures which actuated our sinner, had always 
been attended with the most cruel uncertainty. One is always 
suspicious of an equal return of love : the heart is ingenious in 
rendering itself unhappy, and in tormenting itself with vain fears, 
suspicions, and jealousies: the more generous, true, and frank 
it is itself, the more doth it suffer; it is the martyr of its own dis- 
trusts. You know this well; and it does not belong to me to 
pretend to speak from this place the language of your extra- 
vagant passions. 

But what a new destiny in the change of her love ! Scarcely 
is her love of Jesus Christ commenced, when she is certain of 
being loved: she hears from his divine mouth the favourable 
sentence, which, in remitting her sins, confirms to her the love 
and the affection of him who remits them: not only are her de- 
baucheries forgotten, but she is urged to be convinced, in her 
own mind, that they are forgotten, pardoned, and washed out; 
all her fears are prevented, and ground is no more left for mis- 
trust or uncertainty; nor can she longer suspect the love of 
Jesus Christ, without at same time suspecting his power and 
the faithfulness of his promises. 

Such is the lot of a contrite soul on quitting the tribunal 
where Jesus Christ, through the ministry of the priest, has re- 
mitted debaucheries, which he has washed out with his tears 
and his love. In spite of that uncertainty inseparable from the 
present state of life, whether he be worthy of love or hatred, an 
internal peace bears testimony in the bottom of his heart that 
he is restored to Jesus Christ: he experiences a calm and a joy 
m his conscience which can be the fruit of righteousness alone. 
Not that he is entirely delivered from alarm and apprehension 
on account of his past infidelities, and that, in certain moments, 



262 THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. [Serm. XV. 



more forcibly struck with horror at his past errors, and the 
severity of God's judgments, he is not tempted to consider 
all as hopeless to him; but Jesus Christ, who himself excites 
these storms in his heart, has quickly calmed them; his voice 
still inwardly says to him, as formerly to Peter alarmed upon 
the waves: "O thou of little faith, wherefore doubtest thou?" 
Have I not given thee sufficient proofs of my kindness and my 
protection? Reflect upon all that I have done in order to with- 
draw thee from the ways of iniquity: I seek not with such per- 
severance the sheep that I love not; I recal them not from so 
far, to let them perish before my eyes: Distrust them no more 
my affection; dread only thine own lukewarmness or incon- 
stancy. First consolation of her penitence; the difference of 
her love. 

The second is the sacrifice of her passions. She throws at 
the feet of Jesus Christ her perfumes, her hair, all the attach- 
ments of her heart, all the deplorable instruments of her vanities 
and of her crimes; and do not suppose that in acting thus she 
sacrifices her pleasures; she sacrifices only her anxieties and her 
punishments. 

In vain is it said that the cares of the passions constitute the 
felicity of those possessed by them; it is a language in which 
the world glories, but which experience belies. What punish- 
ment to a worldly soul, anxious to please, are the solicitous cares 
of a beauty which fades and decays every day! What attentions 
and constraints they must take upon themselves, upon their 
inclinations, upon their pleasures, upon their indolence ! What 
inward vexations, when these cares have been unavailing, and 
when more fortunate charms have attracted the general atten- 
tion ! WTiat tyranny is that of custom ! It must, however, be 
submitted to, in spite of deranged affairs, a remonstrating hus- 
band, tradesmen who murmur, and who dearly sell the remissions 
perhaps required. I say nothing of the cares of ambition: what 
a life is that passed in designs, projects, fears, hopes, alarms, 
jealousies, subjection, and meannesses! I speak not of a profane 
connexion: what terrors lest the mystery be laid open? What 
eyes to shun ! What spies to deceive ! What mortifying repulses 
to undergo from the very person for whom they have perhaps 
sacrificed their honour and their liberty, and of whom they dare 
not even complain ! To all these, add those cruel moments when 
passion, less unruly, allows us leisure to inspect ourselves, and 
to feel the whole infamy of our situation; those moments in 
which the heart, born for more solid joys, wearies of its own 
idols, and finds ample punishment in its disgusts and in its own 
inconstancy. World profane ! If such be the felicity thou vaun- 
test so much, distinguish thy worshippers, and, by crowing 
them with such a happiness, punish them for the faith which 
they have so credulously given to thy promises. 

Behold what our sinner casts at the feet of Jesus Christ! 



Serm. XV.] THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 263 



Her bonds, her troubles, her slavery; in appearance, the in- 
struments, of her pleasures, —in truth, the source of all her afflic- 
tions. Now, granting that this were the only consolation of vir- 
tue, is it not a sufficiently grand one, that of deliverance from 
the keenest anxieties of the passions? To have your happiness 
no longer dependent upon the inconstancy, the perfidy, and the 
injustice of creatures; to have placed yourself beyond the reach 
of events; to possess in your own heart all that is wanting to- 
ward your happiness, or to suffice, as I may say, to yourself? 
What do you lose in sacrificing gloomy and anxious cares, in 
order to find peace and inward joy; and to lose all for Jesus 
Christ, is it not, as the apostle says, to have gained all? Thy 
faith hath made thee whole, said the Saviour to the woman; go 
in peace. Behold the treasure which she receives in return for 
the passions sacrificed to him; behold the reward and the con- 
solation of her tears and of her repentance, — that peace of mind, 
which she had never as yet been able to find, and which the 
world had never bestowed. Fools ! says a prophet; misery to 
you, then, who drag on the load of your passions, as the ox in 
labouring drags on the chains of the yoke which galls him, and 
who rush on to your destruction, by the way even of anguish, 
subjection, aud constraint ! 

Lastly, By her sin she had been degraded in the eyes of men : 
they beheld with contempt the shame and the infamy of her 
conduct; she lived degraded from every right which a good re- 
putation and a life free from reproach bestow; and the pharisee 
is even astonished that Jesus Christ should condescend to suffer 
her at his feet. 

For the world, which authorises whatever leads to dissipa- 
tion, never fails. to cover dissipation itself with infamy; it ap- 
proves, it justifies the maxims, the habits, and the pleasures 
which corrupt the heart; and yet it insists that innoeency and 
regularity of manners be united with corruption of heart; it in- 
spires all the passions, yet it always blames the consequences 
of them; it requires you to study the art of pleasing, and it de- 
spises you from the moment that you have succeeded; its lascivi- 
ous theatres resound with extravagant praises of profane love, and 
its conversations consist only of biting satires upon those who 
yield themselves up to that unfortunate tendency; it praises the 
graces, the charms, the miserable talents which light up impure 
desires, and it loads you with everlasting shame and reproach 
from the moment that you appear inflamed with them. O how 
infinitely above description wretched are those who drag on in a 
still beloved World, and which they find themselves incapable of 
doing without, the miserable wrecks of a reputation, either blast- 
ed or but feebly confirmed; and wherever they show themselves, 
to arouse the remembrance or the suspicion of their crimes ! 

Such had been the afflictions and the disgraces, with which the 
passions and the debaucheries of our sinner were followed; but 



264 THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER [Serm. XV. 



her penitence restores to her more honour and more glory, than 
had heen taken from her by the infamy of her crimes. This sin- 
ner so despised in the world, whose name was never mentioned 
without a blush, is praised for the very things which even the 
world considers as most honourable, viz. kindness of heart, gen- 
erosity of sentiments, and the fidelity of a holy love; this sinner, 
with whom no comparison durst ever be made, and whose scan- 
dal was without example in the city, is exalted above the Pharisee ; 
the truth, the sincerity of her faith, of her compunction, of her 
love, merits at once the preference over a superficial and phar- 
isaical virtue : Lastly, This sinner, whose name was concealed, as 
if unworthy of being pronounced, and whose only appellation is 
that of her crimes, is become the glory of Jesus Christ, the praise 
of grace, and an honour to the the gospel. O matchless power of 
virtue ! 

Yes, my brethren, virtue renders us a spectacle, worthy of God, 
of angels and of men: it once more exalts a fallen reputation; 
it renews our claim, even here below, to rights and honours which 
we had forfeited; it washes our stains, which the malignity of 
men would wish to be immortal: it rejoins us to the servants 
of Jesus Christ, and to the society of the just, of whose inter- 
course we were formerly unworthy: it calls forth in us thou- 
sand laudable qualities, which the vortex of the passions had al- 
most for ever engulfed: Lastly, it attracts more glory to us 
than our past manners had attached shame and contempt. 
While Jonah is rebellious to the will of God, he is the curse of 
Heaven, and of the earth; even idolaters are under the neces- 
sity of separating him from their society, and of casting him 
out as a child of infamy and malediction; and a belly of a 
monster is the only asylum in which he can conceal his reproach 
and shame. But, touched with contrition, scarcely hath he im- 
plored the eternal mercies of the God of his fathers, when he 
becomes the admiration of the proud Nineveh; when the gran- 
dees and the people unite to render him honours till then un- 
heard of; when the prince himself, full of respect for his virtue, 
descends from the throne, and covers himself with sackloth and 
ashes, in obedience to the man of God. Those passions which 
the world praises and inspires, had drawn upon us the contempt 
even of the world; virtue, which the world censures and com- 
bats, attracts to us, however unwillingly on its part, its venera- 
tion and homages. 

What, my dear hearer, prevents you then from terminating 
your shame, and your inquietudes, with your crimes? Is it the 
reparations of penitence which alarm you? But the longer you 
delay the more they multiply, the more debts are contracted, 
the more you increase the necessity of new rigours to your 
weakness. ■ Ah ! if the reparations discourage you at present, 
what shall it one day be, when, your crimes multiplied to infi- 
nity, almost no punishment whatever shall be capable of expi- 



Serm. XV.] THE WOMAN WHO WAS A SINNER. 265 



ating them? They shall then plunge you into despair; and 
you will adopt the miserahle part of casting off all yoke, and 
of no longer reckoning upon your salvation; you will raise up 
to yourself new maxims and modes of reasoning, in order to 
tranquillize your mind in freethinking; you will consider as 
needless, a penitence which will then appeal- to you impossible. 
When the embarrassments of the conscience come to a certain 
point, we feel a kind of gloomy satisfaction in persuading our- 
selves that no resource is left; we calm ourselves on the founda- 
tions of truths, when we see ourselves so far removed from what 
they prescribe; we fly to unbelief for a remedy, from the mo- 
ment that we believe it is no longer to be found in faith; from 
the moment that the chaos becomes inexplicable to us, we have 
soon settled it in our minds, that all is uncertain. And, besides, 
what should there be so melancholy and so rigorous in repara- 
tions, whose only merit ought to spring from love? 

Unbelieving soul! You dread being unable to support the 
holy sadness of penitence; yet you have hitherto been able to 
bear up against the internal horrors of guilt: virtue in your eyes 
seems wearisome beyond sufferance; yet have you long dragged 
on under the stings of an ulcerated conscience, which no joy 
could enliven. Ah ! Since you have hitherto been able to bear 
up against all the inward anguish, the bitternesses, the disgusts, 
the gloomy agitations of iniquity, no longer dread those of vir- 
tue: in the pains and sufferances inseparable from guilt, you 
have undergone trials far beyond what may be attached to vir- 
tue ; and doubly so, because grace softens, and renders even 
pleasing, the sufferings of piety, while the only sweetener of 
guilt is the bitterness of guilt itself. 

My God! Is it possible, that, for so many years past, I have 
had strength to wander in such arduous and dreary ways, under 
the tyranny of the world and of the passions, and that I should 
be unable to live with thee, under all the tenderness of thy re- 
gards, under the wings of thy compassion, and under the pro- 
tection of thy arm? Art thou then so cruel a master? The 
world, which knows thee not, believes that thou renderest miser- 
able those who serve thee; but we, O Lord, we know that thou 
art the gentlest and best of masters, the tenderest of all fathers, 
the most faithful of all friends, the most magnificent of all bene- 
factors; and that thou givest a foretaste, by a thousand inward 
consolations with which thou indulgest thy servants here below, 
of that eternal felicity which thou preparest for them here- 
after. 



266 



THE WORD OF GOD. [Serm. XVL 



SERMON XVI. 

THE WORD OF GOD. 

Matthew iv. 4. 

It is written , that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word 
that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. 

Nothing can give a better idea of the power and of the sub- 
limity of the word of the gospel, than the images employed by 
Jesus Christ to foretel its effects. One while it is a sacred sword, 
which is to divide father from child, husband from wife, brother 
from sister, and man from himself; to bend all minds under the 
yoke of faith, to subjugate the Cesars, to triumph over sages 
and the learned, and to exalt the standard of the cross upon the 
wrecks of idols and of empires; through that is represented to 
us its might, which the whole world hath been unable to resist. 

One while it is a divine fire, spread in an instant throughout 
the earth, which goes to dissolve the mountains, to depopulate 
the cities, to people the forest, to reduce into ashes the profane 
temples, to inflame the minds of men, and to make them fly, 
like madmen, to death, in the sight of nations; and under these 
parabolical traits are figured to us the promptitude of its opera- 
tions, and the rapidity of its victories. 

One while it is a mysterious leaven, which joins and reunites 
the whole mass; which binds all its parts together, and impresses 
upon them one general efficacy and virtue; which overthrows 
the distinction of Jew and Gentile, of Greek and Barbarian, 
and gives to all the same name and the same being: and here 
you comprehend \\ow great must be its sanctity and inward 
might, seeing it hath purified the whole universe, and of all na- 
tions hath made but one people. 

Another time it is a seed, which at first appears lost in the 
earth, but afterwards springs up, and multiplies an hundred fold. 
And behold the first cause of the fecundity ! not the husband- 
man who sows, but the invisible Author who giveth the increase. 

But at present Jesus Christ compares it to bread, which serves 
as the food of man; and he thereby means to inform us that the 
word of the gospel is a powerful and solid nourishment, often 
pernicious to such as receive it into a diseased and corrupted 
heart, and useful only to souls who, with a holy appetite, 
nourish themselves with it, and who bring to this place a heart 
prepared to listen to it. 

To confine myself then to this idea, I shall say nothing of the 
wonders which this word, announced by twelve poor and hum- 



Serm. XVI.] THE WORD OF GOD. 



267 



ble men, formerly wrought throughout the universe. I shall pass 
over in silence the sanctity of its doctrine, the sublimity of its 
counsels, the wisdom of its maxims; and, limiting myself to the 
instruction, and to that which may render the word of the gos- 
pel which we announce, beneficial to you, I shall inform you, 
firstly, what are the dispositions which ought to accompany you 
to this holy place for the purpose of hearing it; and, secondly, 
in what mind you ought afterwards to listen to it: Two duties 
not only neglected, but even unknown to the greatest part of 
the believers who run in crowds to the feet of these Christian 
pulpits, and which are the ordinary cause of our ministry being 
attended with so little fruit. 

Part I. It is not the body of external works, says St. Au- 
gustin, which distinguishes the just from carnal Christians; it 
is the invisible spirit which animates them. Pious actions are 
frequently common to the good and to the wicked; it is the dis- 
position of the heart which discriminates them. All run, says 
the apostle, but all reach not the goal, for it is not the same 
spirit which impels them. 

Now, to apply this maxim to my subject; of all the duties of 
Christian piety, there is undoubtedly none of which the external 
is more equally fulfilled by the worldly, and by the pious, than 
that of coining to hear the word of the gospel. All run in 
crowds, like the Israelites formerly to the foot of the holy moun- 
tain, to hear the words of the law. Our temples are hardly 
sufficient to contain the multitude of believers: profane assem- 
blies break up to swell the number of the holy assembly at 
the hours of instruction; and the ages which have seen the 
zeal of Christians so relaxed on every other duty of religion, 
have not, it would seem, witnessed it in this. Nevertheless, of 
all the ministries confided to the church for the consummation 
of the chosen, there is almost none so unprofitable as that of 
the word; and the most efficacious mean which the church hath, 
in every age, employed for the conversion of men, is become, at 
present, its feeblest resource. You, my brethren, are yourselves 
a melancholy proof of this truth. Never were instructions more 
frequent than in our days, and never were conversions so rare. 

It is of importance, therefore, to explain the causes of so com- 
mon and so deplorable an abuse: now, the first is undoubtedly 
in the want of those dispositions which ought to accompany you 
to r this holy place, in order to listen to the word of salvation. 
And surely, if St. Paul formerly commanded all believers to 
purify themselves before coming to eat of the bread of life; if 
he declared to them, that not to distinguish it from ordinary 
food was to render themselves guilty of the body of the Lord, 
we have no less reason to tell you that you ought to prove your- 
selves, and to prepare your soul before you come to participate 
in that spiritual food which we break for the people; and that 



268 



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[Serm. XVI. 



not to distinguish it from the word of men, in your manner of 
listening to it, it is to render yourselves guilty even of the word 
of Jesus Christ. 

The first disposition required of you hy the sanctity of this 
word, when you come to hear it, is a sincere desire that it may 
be useful to you. Before coming to our temples, you ought 
privately, in your own house, to address yourself to the Father 
of Light, to intreat him to bestow upon you that ear of the heart 
which alone makes his voice to be heard; to give to his word 
that efficacy, that inward unction, those attractions so powerful 
and so successful in the conversion of sinners, that he may over- 
come that insensibility which you have opposed to all the truths 
hitherto heard; that he fix those momentary feelings which you 
have so often experienced while listening to us, but which have 
never been productive of any consequences towards your salva- 
tion; that to us he give that zeal, that wisdom, that dignity, 
that fulness of his sprit, those piercing lights, that divine 
vehemence which carries conviction to the heart and which 
never speaks in vain; that he form in our hearts the relish 
of those truths which he putteth in our mouths; that he 
render us insensible to your praises, or to your censures, in order 
that we may be more useful to your wants; that the ardent de- 
sire to accomplish your salvation fully compensate the want of 
those talents denied to us by nature; and that we honour our 
ministry, not by seeking to please, but to save you. 

And, surely, if the Israelites, before approaching Mount Sinai 
to hear the words of the law which the angel was to announce 
to them, were obliged, by the order of the Lord, to purify them- 
selves, to wash their garments, and even to abstain from the 
holy duties of marriage, in order to prepare themselves for that 
grand operation, and to carry nothing to the foot of the moun- 
tain unworthy of the sanctity of the law they went to hear; is 
it not, says a holy father, much more reasonable, when you come 
to hear the words of a more holy law, that you bring there at 
least those precautions of faith, of piety, of external respect, 
which mark in you a sincere desire of conforming your manners 
to those maxims which we are to announce to you? What, my 
brethren ! are the precepts of Jesus Christ, the words of eternal 
life, to be listened to with less precaution than the ordinances 
of a figurative law? Is it because they are no longer announced 
to you by an angel from heaven? But are we not equally as he, 
the instruments of God to promulgate his word, and, like him, 
do we not speak in his place? Did the angel upon the mountain 
bear more the mark of divinity than we bear of him? He wrote 
the law upon tables of stone; the grace of our ministry engraves 
it on hearts. He promised milk and honey; and we announce 
real and everlasting riches. The thunders of heaven, which ac- 
companied his menaces against the trangressors of the law 
overthrew the people struck with terror at the foot of the moun- 
tain: but what were these threatenings and temporal maledic- 



Seem. XVI.] THE WORD OF GOD. 



269 



tions, their cities demolished, their wives and children led into 
captivity, when compared to that eternal misery which we are in- 
structed continually to foretel to the violators of the law of God? 
Separate what we are from the ministry which we fill, and what 
is there here, either less awful or less respectable than upon 
mount Sinai? 

And, nevertheless, what preparations accompany you to an 
action so holy and so worthy of respect? A vain curiosity which 
you wish to gratify; an irksome leisure which you are well 
pleased to have amused; a religious spectacle, the pleasure of 
which you wish to share; a custom which you follow, because 
the world hath adopted it? What do I know? The pleasure, 
perhaps, of pleasing a master, by imitating his respect for the 
word of the gospel, and far more in order to attract his regards 
than those of divine mercy? Once more, what do I know? 
Perhaps views still more criminal, and of which we cannot speak 
without degrading the dignity of our ministry. No motive of 
salvation leads you here; no view of faith prepares you, no 
sentiment of piety accompanies you to this place; in a word, 
your coming to listen to the holy word is no work of religion. 

First cause of the inutility of our ministry. For, how is it 
possible that a proceeding altogether profane send a disposition 
to grace? And that, in this multitude of believers, assembled 
in this holy place, the goodness of God distinguish you from 
among the crowd, to open your heart to the word of life; you 
who have brought hither only those dispositions which are most 
calculated to keep at a distance that mercy? My brethren, as 
religion hath nothing grander, in one sense, than the charge of 
the doctrine and of truth, so piety likewise knows nothing so 
important, and which requires more religious precautions, than 
a proper attention to, and the being well instructed in them. 

The second disposition which ought to accompany you to this 
holy place, is, a disposition of grief and shame, founded on the 
little fruit you have hitherto reaped from so many truths already 
heard. You ought to reflect upon all those feelings of com- 
punction, which the Lord, through the ministry of the word, 
hath operated in your hearts, yet which have never been attend- 
ed with any success towards your salvation; so many pious re- 
solutions, inspired in this place, which seemed to promise a 
change of life, yet which have all vanished on the first tempta<- 
tion. For, what in this ought most to alarm you, is, that all 
those truths which have made only such momentary impressions 
on you, are so many witnesses, who shall one day depose 
against you before the tribunal of Jesus Christ: in proportion 
to the times that the word of the gospel hath failed to touch 
you even to repentance, so many times hath it rendered you 
more unworthy of obtaining the grace of repentance. Faith, 
on this point, admits of no medium; and, if you depart unchan- 
ged, you depart, in some respect, more culpable than before, be- 



270 



THE WORD OF GOD. [Serm. XVI. 



cause, to all your other crimes, you have added that of contempt 
of the holy word. 

Behold the reflections which ought to occupy your faith ; and, 
when you enter the assembly of believers, you ought, while 
trembling over the past, to demand of yourself : Am I going to 
hear a word which shall judge me, or truths which shall deliver 
me? Am I going to offer up to the compassion of God a do- 
cile and willing heart, or to his justice fresh motives of condem- 
nation against myself? It is now so long since truths have been 
announced to me, the force of which my utmost deference to 
the passions cannot weaken in my mind; for, in spite of myself, 
they make me inwardly acknowledge the error of my ways: 
yet, have I taken a single step towards acquitting them ! I have 
so long been warned that the body of a Christian is the temple 
of God; have I, in consequence, become more temperate and 
chaste? I have so long heard it said, that " if thine eye be evil, 
pluck it out, and cast it far from thee;" have I attained strength 
for such separations which I know to be so indispensable towards 
my salvation? I have so long been told, that to defer, as I have 
done from day to day, my penitence, is to be determined to die 
in sin; do I, even now, find myself more disposed to quit my de- 
plorable situation, and with a willing heart to begin the work 
of my salvation? 

Great God ! Cease not to give me a heart susceptible to truths, 
which always affect, but never change me; and punish not the 
abuse which I make of thy word, by depriving it, with regard 
to me, of that efficacy which thou still per mitt est it to have, 
in order to recal me from my errors to penitence ! And, my 
brethren, how many believers who listen to me, formerly alive 
to those truths which we announce, no longer offer to them now 
but a tranquil and a hardened heart! They neglected those 
happy times when grace was yet willing to open this way of 
conversion; and, ever since so continued and so fatal a negli- 
gence, they listen to us with indifference, and the most terrible 
truths in our mouths are no longer in their ears but sounding 
brass, and a tinkling cymbal. 

Now, I ask your own hearts, my brethren, if this feeling of 
sorrow, for the little advantage you have hitherto reaped from 
so many instructions, is even known to you? Doth that out- 
ward pomp, with which you come here, worldly women, an- 
nounce that disposition? Do not the same indecent and vain 
cares, which fit you for profane spectacles, accompany you to 
our instructions, where the world is condemned? Do you make 
the smallest difference there in your appearance? And doth it 
not seem, either that we are to announce the foolish maxims of 
the theatres, or that you come for the sole purpose of insulting, 
by an indecent carriage, even in the eyes of the world, the holy 
maxims of the gospel? 

But what do I say, my dear hearer? Far from reproaching 
to yourselves so many truths, heard hitherto without fruit, 



Serm. XVL] THE WORD OF GOD. 



271 



alas! you are perhaps delighted at your insensibility; you per- 
haps pride yourselves and indulge a deplorable vanity, in listen- 
ing to us with indifference; you perhaps consider it as giving 
you an air of consequence, and as a proof of superiority of mind, 
that what others are affected by should leave you tranquil and 
calm; you perhaps make a vain boast of your insensibility. It 
seems, that in you it would be a weakness to be affected by 
truths which formerly triumphed over philosophers and Cesars; 
by truths, evidently come down from heaven, and which bear 
with them such divine marks of sublimity and wisdom; by truths 
which do such honour to man, and alone worthy of reason; by 
truths, so soothing and consolatory to the heart, and alone cal- 
culated to bestow internal tranquillity and peace. Lastly, By 
truths, which propose to us such grand interests, and towards 
which we can never be indifferent, without folly and madness. 
You vaunt the little success of our zeal, and that all our dis- 
courses leave you exactly as they found you; and, in declaring 
this, you think you are doing honour to your reason. I do not 
say to you, that you make a boast of being in that depth of the 
abyss, and in that state of reprobation which is now almost be- 
yond resource, and which is worthy both of horror and pity; 
but I say to you, that the surest and most established mark of 
a light and frivolous mind, of a weak and limited reason, of an 
ill-formed heart, equally incapable of elevation and dignity, is 
that of finding nothing which strikes, which astonishes, which 
satisfies, and which interests you in the wise and sublime truths 
of the morality of Jesus Christ. 

For the sinners of another character still preserve at least 
some remains of respect for, and a certain consciousness of the 
truth which subsists with a life altogether criminal, but which 
is always the mark of a good heart, of a heart which still re- 
tains a relish for good, of a judicious reason, which, though led 
away by the world and the passions, knows to do justice to it- 
self, still feels the force of that truth which condemns it, and 
leaves within us resources of salvation and repentance. These 
sinners, at least, acknowledge that we are right: they change 
nothing, it is true, of their manners; but the truth at least, 
affects, disturbs, agitates, and excites within them some feeble 
desires of salvation and hopes of a future conversion they 
are sorry to find themselves even too susceptible of the terrors 
of faith; they are almost afraid of listening to us, lest they lose 
that false tranquillity which is the only comfort of their crimes; on 
quitting our instruction, they seek, in dissipation, to enliven a 
fund of anxiety and sadness which the truths they come from 
hearing have left in their soul; they immediately hurry into the 
world and its pleasures, with that inward sting which the word 
of God hath left in their heart, there to seek out a soothing and 
deceitful hand which may draw it out, and which may close up 
that wound from which alone its cure ought to flow; they dread 



THE WORD OF GOD. [Serm.XVL 



the breaking of their chains; they turn away their head that 
they may not see that light which comes to disturb the comfort 
of their sleep. They love their passions, I confess, but at least 
they insult not the truth; on the contrary, they render glory 
to its might, by erecting defences against it; they are feeble 
sinners, who, dreading their incapability of defence against God, 
fly from, and shun him. But for you, you make a vain-glorious 
boast of listening to him with indifference, and of not dreading 
him; you find it grand and philosophical to have placed your- 
selves above all these vulgar terrors; you believe that the pride 
of your reason would be dishonoured by any religious dread) 
and while you are internally the meanest and the most coward- 
ly soul, the most dejected by the first danger which threatens 
you, the most disheartened by the smallest accident, the very 
shuttle-cock of every frivolous hope and fear of the earth, 
you pique yourself upon an undaunted courage against the 
truth; that is to say, that you are possessed of every thing 
which is mean and vulgar in fear, and you are ashamed of hav- 
ing that only portion of it which is dignified and reasonable ; 
you have no resistance to offer against the world, and you make 
a vain parade of a senseless valour against God. 

Second disposition which ought to accompany you to our in- 
structions, a sorrow for the little fruit you have hitherto reaped 
from them. The last disposition is a grateful feeling for that 
mean of salvation still provided for you by God, in preserving 
the sacred trust of the truth, and in continuing amid you the 
succession of these ministers alone authorized to announce to 
you the holy word. 

In effect, the most terrible chastisement with which God for- 
merly struck the iniquities of his people, was that of rendering 
his word rare and precious among them. As he saith through 
his prophet Amos, " And they shall wander from sea to sea, and 
<c from the east even to the west; they shall run to and fro to 
" seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it." And, not 
only he ceased to raise up true prophets in Israel, but he likewise 
permitted false teachers to spring up among his people, who 
turned the tribes away from his worship, and preached gods to 
them which their fathers had never known. 

Now, my brethren, it is a signal mercy of God, that, notwith- 
standing the iniquities which seem to have attained to their ut- 
most height among you, he still raiseth up to you prophets and 
pastors who hold out a sound and a faultless word. It is a 
most singular protection of the Lord, that error hath not 
been permitted to prevail over truth among us. And what 
have you done to merit the being thus distinguished from so 
many other nations? Why is it that you are not involved in 
the same condemnation? Why have you dwelt in that happy 
land of Goshen, alone shone upon by the lights of heaven, 
while all the rest of Egypt was enveloped in darkness? Is it not 



Serm. XVI.] THE WORD OF GOD. 



2*73 



the sole mercy of God who hath marked you out from among 
so many nations which applaud themselves in their error? You 
are still under the care of your pastors; you still receive from 
their mouths the doctrine of the apostles; truth still flows up- 
on you in a pure and divine stream; Christian pulpits still re- 
sound in every part with the maxims of faith and of piety; and 
by preserving to you the doctrine and the blessings of instruc- 
tion, the goodness of God still provides for you a thousand 
means of salvation. 

Nevertheless, when you come to listen to us, do you bring a 
heart filled with gratitude? Do you consider, as a signal blessing 
of God, the charge of the truth and of the holy word, which he 
hath preserved, and permitted still to be announced to you? Do 
you ever say with the prophet, " He hath not dealt so with any 
nation; and as for his judgments, they have not known them?" 

Alas! you bring here only vanity and irreligious disgust; 
the most wearisome of your moments are those which you em- 
ploy in listening to truths which ought to compose the whole 
consolation of your life. We are even obliged to respect your 
languors and disgusts, by often mingling human ornaments with 
the truth, which is thereby weakened; it would indeed appear, 
that we come here to speak to you for ourselves; and you give 
the same attention to us as you do to troublesome mendicants who 
are soliciting your favour. You have no regret for moments oc- 
cupied by the frivolous pleasures of a profane spectacle; there 
alone it is that every thought of business, of fortune, and of 
family, is rejected as an intrusion, and that, all else forgotten, 
the mind, formed for more serious matters, feasts with avidity 
on chimerical adventures; it is from thence that you always 
come out occupied and delighted with the lascivious maxims 
promulgated by a criminal theatre. You dwell with transport 
on those parts which have made the most dangerous impressions 
upon the heart; you come filled with their remembrance even 
to the foot of the altar. These images, so fatal to innocence, 
can no longer be effaced; while, on quitting the word, the only 
portion retained by your memory is perhaps the defects of him 
who hath announced it to you. 

My brethren, God no longer punisheth in a grievous manner 
the contempt of his word. He, no doubt, might still transport 
his gospel amidst those barbarous nations who have never heard 
his name, and abandon anew his heritage: He might draw from 
out of their deserts ferocious and infidel nations, and deliver up 
to them our temples and our habitations, as he formerly deliver- 
ed up those churches so celebrated, which the Tertullians, the 
Cyprians, the Augustins had illustrated, and where now not a 
trace of Christianity remains but in the insults which Jesus 
Christ there receives, and in the shackles with which believers 
are there loaded: He might do it; but he avengeth himself more 
secretly, and perhaps more terribly. He leaveth to you still 

s 



274 



THE WORD OF GOD. 



[Serm. XVI. 



the spectacle and all the outward ceremony of the preaching of 
the gospel, but he turneth the whole fruit of it upon the simple 
and ignorant inhabitants of the country; the terrors of faith 
are no longer but for them. He no longer withdraweth his pro- 
phets from cities; but he taketh away from them, if I may 
venture to say so, the power and the influence of their ministry; 
he striketh these holy clouds with dryness and unfruitfulness'^ 
he raiseth up to you such as render truth flowery and beautiful, 
but who do not render it amiable; who please, but who do not 
convert you: he permitteth the holy terrors of his doctrine to 
be weakened in our mouths: he no longer draweth forth, from 
the treasures of his mercy, grand characters like those raised 
up in the ages of our forefathers, who renewed cities and king- 
doms, who led the great and the people, and who changed the 
palaces of kings into houses of penitence; he permitteth that 
we, weak men, succeed to these apostolic men. 

What more shall I add? We assemble here, like Paul for- 
merly in Athens, idle and curious spectators, whose only 
view is that of hearing something new; while those who per- 
form the functions of their ministry among your vassals, see 
with consolations at their feet, like Esdras formerly, simple 
Israelites, who are unable to retain their tears in hearing only 
the words of the law. We amuse the leisure and the idleness 
of princes and the great of the earth, while, in the country, 
holy ministers bring forth Jesus Christ, and reap an abundant 
harvest: In a word, we preach, and they convert. It is thus, 
O my God, that in secret thou exercisest severe and terrible 
judgments. 

But, my brethren, why may not we say here to you, what 
Paul and Barnabus formerly said to the unbelieving Jews? 
" It was necessary that the word of God should first have been 
spoken to you; but, seeing ye put it from you, and judge your- 
selves unworthy of everlasting life, lo ! we turn to the Gentiles." 
We shall therefore turn towards the nations hitherto abandon- 
ed, towards those humble and poor people buried in ignorance, 
who cultivate your lands, and who will, with faith and grati- 
tude, receive that grace which you reject. Ah! our labours 
would be much more availing, our yoke more easy, our ministry 
more consoling; we should not then, it is true, reckon among 
our hearers names celebrated in history; but we would reckon 
the names of those who are written in heaven: we should not 
see there assembled all those titles and splendid dignities, 
which form the whole glory of "the world which passeth away; 
but we would there see faith, piety, and innocence, which com- 
pose the whole glory of the Christian who eternally endureth: 
we should not hear there vain applauses given to the language 
of the man, and not to that of faith; but we would behold 
those tears flowing which are the immortal praise of grace: 
our pulpits might not indeed be surrounded with so much 



Serm. XVL] 



THE WORD OF GOD. 



275 



pomp ; but our hearers would be a spectacle worthy of angels, 
and of God. 

Such are the dispositions which ought to prepare you for 
our instructions. It is necessary now to instruct you on the 
mind in which you ought to listen to us. 

Part II. In order towards instructing you on the mind in 
which you ought to listen to the holy word, it is required only 
to establish at first what are its authority and its end. Its 
authority, which is divine, demands a respectful and docile 
mind; its end, which is the conversion of hearts, demands a 
spirit of faith, which searches in it only such lights as may 
enable it to quit its errors, and such remedies as may cure its 
evils. 

1st, I say that its authority is divine. Yes, my brethren, the 
word which we announce to you is not our word, but the word 
of him who sendeth us. From the moment that we are esta- 
blished by him in the holy ministry, through the way of a legi- 
timate call, he wilieth that you consider us as sent by him, as 
speaking to you here on his part, and as only lending our weak 
voice to his divine words. We bear, it is true, that treasure 
in vessels of earth; but it thereby loses nothing of its majesty. 
Like those pitchers which Gideon formerly employed against 
the enemies of the Lord, the sound may be mean and contemp- 
tible; but truth, that divine light which God hath placed with- 
in us, is not, from thence, less descended from heaven, or des- 
tined, like the lamps of Gideon, still to strike with terror un- 
faithful souls. 

Now, you owe, in the first place, to the authority of this di- 
vine word, a pious docility and an attention to it, rather in the 
light of disciples than of judges. In effect, we expose to you 
the rules of worship and of piety, the decisions of the gospel, 
the laws of the church, and the maxims of the holy. We come 
not here to give you our own opinions, our prejudices, our 
thoughts; this is not a pulpit of controversy, it is the place of 
truth; nothing which can alford room for disputation ought 
ever to find place in the pulpit of peace and of unity; we speak 
here in the name of the church, and are only the interpreters of 
her faith and of her doctrine. 

Nevertheless, how many of those men, so wise in their own 
conceit, and who pique themselves upon sagacity and reason, 
come here with a mind set against, and, as it were, watchfully 
upon guard against all the terrors of the holy word ! They 
make not a boast, like the sinners we have lately mentioned, of 
being callous to all truth; but they look upon our ministry as 
an art of exaggeration and hyperbole; the most holy emotions 
of zeal are only, in their opinion, studied tricks of human arti- 
fice; the most awful threatenings, only the sallies of a vain 
eloquence; the most incontrovertible maxims, only discourses 



276 



THE WORD OF GOD. 



[Serm. XVI. 



adapted rather to custom than to truth. Such, my brethren, 
is the deplorable situation in which the greatest part of you find 
yourselves here. You always inwardly oppose, to that truth 
which we announce, the maxims and the prejudices of the world, 
which contradict it; you are ingenious in weakening in your 
own breast, by specious reasons, the pretended excess of our 
maxims; you come here to combat, and not to yield to the 
force, or to the light of truth; you come here, it would seem, 
only in order to enter into contestation with God, to invalidate 
the eternal immutability of his word, to undertake the interests 
of error against the glory of truth, and to be the inward apolo- 
gists of the world and of the passions, even in that holy place 
destined to condemn and to combat them. Ah! suiter that 
truth, at least, to triumph in its own temple; dispute not with 
it that feeble victory, which has formerly triumphed over the 
whole universe; oppress it, and welcome, amidst the world, and 
in those assemblies of vanity which error collects, and where 
error is enthroned. Is it not enough that you have banished 
it from the world, and that it dare no longer show itself with- 
out being exposed to derisions and censures? Leave to us, at 
least, the melancholy consolation of daring still to publish it in 
the face of those altars which it hath raised up, and which 
ought surely to serve it, at least, as a place of refuge. 

You accuse us of exaggeration. Great God! And thou wilt 
one day perhaps judge us for weakening the force and the influ- 
ence of thy word, in consequence of not giving sufficient con- 
sideration to it at the feet of the altars ! And thou wilt one day 
perhaps reproach us for having accommodated the holy severity 
of thy gospel to the indulgences and the softenings of our age ! 
And thou wilt perhaps range us one day among the workers of 
iniquity, because the lukewarmness and negligence of our man- 
ners have taken from the word which we announce, that terror 
and that divine vehemence which can only be found in a mouth 
consecrated by piety and by penitence ! 

How, my brethren ! The truths of salvation, such as Jesus 
Christ hath set forth to us, would be incapable of alarming con- 
sciences, were the mind of man not to add extraneous terrors to 
them? Paul formerly exaggerated, then, when the Roman go- 
vernor, in spite of the pride of a false wisdom, and all the pre- 
judices of an idolatrous worship, trembled, says St. Luke, while 
hearing him speak of righteousness, of temperance, and of the 
awful spectacle of a judgment to come? Paul then exaggerated, 
when the inhabitants of cities came striking their breasts, melt- 
ing in tears at his feet, and bringing into the middle of the 
public places the lascivious or impious books, and all the other 
instruments of their passions, in order to make a sacrifice of 
them to the Lord? 

You accuse us of adding additional terrors to the words of 
the gospel; but where are the consciences which we disturb? 




Serm. XVI.] THE WORD OF GOD. 



277 



Where are the sinners whom we alarm? Where are the worldly 
souls, who, seized with dread on their departure from our dis- 
courses, go to conceal themselves in the deepest solitudes, and, 
by holy excesses of penitence, to expiate the dissoluteness of 
their past manners ? The ages which have preceded us have 
often seen such examples. Do we ever witness such instances 
now? Ah! would to God, said formerly a holy father, that 
you could convict me of having inspired a single soul with these 
salutary terrors ! Would to God, said he to some worldly sages 
of his time* who accused him of exaggerating the dangers and 
the corruption of the world, that a single instance might sup- 
port your assertion! And I may say to you here, with even 
more reason than that grand character, Would to God that the 
consequences of so blessed an indiscretion could be shown to 
me ! Would to God that you had examples with which to re- 
proach us, in justification of your censures! Ah! we with 
pleasure would suffer the blame, could but the success be shown 
to us with which we are reproached ! 

Alas! We manage only too much, perhaps, your weakness; 
we respect, perhaps too much, customs which a long usage has 
consecrated, in the fear of appearing to censure the grand ex- 
amples by which they are authorized; we dare scarcely speak 
of certain irregularities, lest our censures should appear to fall 
rather on the persons than on the vices; we are obliged to con- 
tent ourselves with showing truths to you from afar, which we 
ought to place immediately under your eye; and even your sal- 
vation frequently suffers through the excess of our precautions 
and our timid prudence. What shall I say? Weakness often 
extorts from us praises, where zeal ought to place anathemas 
and censures: like the world, we allow ourselves to be dazzled 
by names and titles; that which formerly encouraged the Am- 
broses intimidates us; and, because we owe you respect, we 
often keep back from you that truth which we ought still more 
to respect; yet, after all this, you accuse us of exaggeration, of 
overstraining truths, and of fashioning from them phantoms of 
our own brain, in order to alarm those who listen to us. 

But what advantage could we draw from an artifice so un- 
worthy of that truth confided to us? These overstrained and 
puerile declamations might suit the venal eloquence of those 
Sophists, who, amid the Grecian schools, anxiously sought to 
attract disciples to themselves, by vaunting the wisdom of their 
sect. But for us, my brethren, ah ! our wish would be to have 
it in our power to render your path more easy, far from throw- 
ing fresh obstacles in the way. Wherefore should we dishearten 
you in the enterprise of salvation, by starting chimerical dif- 
ficulties? It is our duty to smooth such as may actually be found 
in it, and to tender you an assisting hand, in order to sustain 
your weakness. 

Meditate, my brethren, upon the law of Jesus Christ; whajl 



\ 



THE WORD OF GOD. [Serm. XVI. 



do I say? Only open the gospel and read; then shall you find 
that we draw a veil of discretion over the severity of its 
maxims; then, far from complaining of our excesses, you will 
yourselves supply the deficiencies of our silence and of our 
softenings, and will say to yourselves what we dread to say, 
because you could never bear it. Great God ! To bear his cross 
every day, to despise the world and all it contains, to live as a 
stranger upon the earth, to attach himself to thee alone, to re- 
nounce all which flatters the senses, incessantly to renounce 
himself, to consider as happy those who weep or who are 
afflicted, behold the substance of thy holy law, and which every 
Christian undertakes. O ! what can the human mind add to 
the rigour of this doctrine ! What could we announce to you 
more melancholy or more formidable to self-love? Conse- 
quently, your reproaches are merely a vain language of the 
world, and one of those fashions of speaking which no one exa- 
mines, and each adopts; your conscience inwardly believes it; 
and when you speak candidly, you confess that we are in the 
right, and that the gospel is a preacher much more severe and 
more fearful for the world, and for those who love it, than it 
could be possible for us ever to be. 

First duty which the authority of the holy word exacts of 
you, viz. a docile spirit. 

Secondly, You owe to the authority of this holy word a spirit 
of sincerity, and inward application of it to yourself; that is to 
say, to be a rigorous examinator here of your own conscience; 
to have incessantly before your eyes, on one side, the state of 
your soul, and on the other, the truths which we announce; 
lo measure yourself according to that rule; to search into your- 
self by that light; to judge yourself by that law; to listen to, 
as if addressed to you alone, the holy maxims announced to the 
multitude; to consider yourself as alone here before Jesus Christ, 
who speaks to you alone through our mouth, and who sends us 
here perhaps for you alone. For, my brethren, no one here 
takes to himself that truth which attacks and condemns him; 
no one thinks himself an interested personage; it would seem 
that we form at pleasure to ourselves phantoms of the brain, for 
the purpose of combating them, and that the reality of that sin- 
ner whom we attack is nowhere in existence. The lewd and 
dissolute person recognizes not himself in the most animated and 
most striking traits of his passion. The man, loaded with ill- 
acquired wealth, and perhaps with the blood and spoils of the 
people, joins with us in deprecating that very iniquity in others, 
and sees not that he judges himself. The courtier, consumed 
with ambition, and who sacrifices conscience and integrity every 
day to that idol, frankly admits of the meanness of that passion 
in his equals, and looks upon it as a virtue, and as a deep ex- 
perience of the court in himself. Every one continually views 
himself by certain favourable sides, which effectually hinder him 



Serm.XVL] THE WORD OF GOD. 



279 



from ever knowing himself such as he is. In vain do we mark 
you, as I may say, in the most pointed manner; you always in- 
wardly find out some softened traits, which alter the resemblance. 
You whisper to yourself, I am not this man. And, while the 
public makes application of such striking truths to us, we alone 
either succeed in being convinced that they are not drawn for 
us, or we only find out in them the defects of our brethren; in 
our own exactest portraits, we search out foreign liknesses; 
we are ingenious in turning the blow upon others, which truth 
had given to us alone; the malignity of the application is the 
only fruit which we reap from that .picture of our vices made 
from the pulpit, and we rashly judge our brethren where we 
ought to have judged only ourselves. And thus it is, O my 
God! that men become corrupted, misapply every thing, and 
that even the light of truth seals up their eyes upon their own 
errors, and opens them only to see in others either what is not, 
or what it ought to have kept entirely hid from them. 

Such are the duties which the authority of the holy word ex- 
acts of you. Let us now proceed to those attached to its end. 
Its end, my brethren, you know, is the conversion of hearts, the 
establishment of truth, the destruction of error and of sin, and 
the sanctification of the name of Jesus Christ. All there is grand, 
elevated, important, and worthy of the most sublime function 
of the hierarchy; and, consequently, it is from thence to be in- 
ferred, that you ought to listen to us with a respectful and re- 
ligious spirit, which despises not the simplicity of our discourses, 
and with a spirit of faith which seeks nothing human in it, no- 
thing frivolous, nothing which does not correspond with the 
excellency and the dignity of its end. 

I say a spirit of religious respect, which despises not the sim- 
plicity of our discourses; for, however enlightened you may 
m other respects be, you ought not, in consequence of your pre- 
tended lights, to claim a title to neglect the instructions of the 
church to believers. The unction of the spirit will always in- 
form you of something here, of which you would perhaps have 
remained ignorant. If possessed of that knowledge which is the 
cause of pride, you will be strengthened in that charity which 
edifies. If your mind acquire nothing new, your heart shall 
perhaps be made to feel new things: you will there at least learn 
that your knowledge is nothing, if you be ignorant of the science 
of salvation; that you are but a cloud without moisture, elevated, 
it is true, above other men, by your talents, and by the supe- 
riority of your knowledge, but empty of grace and the sport of 
every wind and of every passion in the sight of God; and, lastly, 
that a simple and pure soul shall, in an instant, be taught the 
whole in the bosom of God, and shall be transformed from light 
to light; while, on the contrary, that you, after an entire life 
of watchings and ardent study, and the attainment of a useless 



280 



THE WORD OF GOD. 



[Serm. XVI. 



mass of knowledge and lights, shall perhaps reap for your por- 
tion only eternal darkness. 

What a mistake, my brethren, to banish yourselves from 
these holy assemblies, under pretence that you already know- 
enough, and likewise that you are already sufficiently versed in 
all the duties of piety, which you have long professed; and that 
Christian reading, and a small degree of reflection in private, 
go a greater way, and are attended with more benefit, than all 
our discourses ! But, my dear hearer, if you profess piety and 
righteousness, what sweeter consolation can you enjoy than that 
of hearing the wonders of the Lord published, the ordinances of 
his holy law, truths which you love and practise, and of which 
you ought to wish the knowledge to be given to all men ! WTiat 
sight more soothing and consoling to you than that of your 
brethren assembled here at the foot of the altar, attentive to the 
words of life, absent from the spectacles of the world, and re- 
moved from the occasions of sin, forming holy desires, opening 
their hearts to the voice of God, perhaps conceiving the promises 
of the Holy Spirit, and the commencement of their penitence, 
and to be enabled to join yourself with them, in order to obtain 
from the Father of mercies, the completion in their soul of the 
work of salvation, which he hath begun to operate within them? 

Not but that the most consolatory resources are furnished to 
Christain piety, by the meditation of the divine writings. But 
the Lord hath attached grace to the power of our ministry, and 
to the legitimate calling, which you will not find elsewhere. The 
most simple truths in the mouths of the pastors, or of those who 
speak to you in their place, draw an efficacy from the grace of 
their missions, which is not inherent to them. The same book of 
Isaiah, which, when read from a chariot by that officer of the 
queen of Ethiopia, was to him as a book sealed up, and only 
amused his leisure without enlightening his faith, explained by 
Philip, instantly became to him a word of life, and of salvation. 
And, lastly, You owe that example to your brethren, that edifi- 
cation to the church, that respect to the word of Jesus Christ, 
that uniformity to the spirit of peace and of unity, which binds 
us together. O banish yourselves, and so much the better, from 
those profane and criminal assemblies, where piety, alas ! is al- 
ways a stranger, suffering, and constrained: But here is its place, 
and its home; this is the assembly of the holy, seeing it is only 
towards their formation that our ministry hath been establish- 
ed, and still continues to endure in the church. 

I have said, in the second place, a spirit of faith; and, in this 
disposition, two others are comprised: a love of the holy word, 
independent of the talents of the man who announces it to you; 
a taste, formed by religion, which comes not here in search of 
vain ornaments, but of the solid truths of salvation; that is to 
, say, to listen to it, neither with a spirit of censure nor with a 
spirit of curiosity. 



Serm. XVL] THE WORD OF GOD. 281 



And, in effect, your love of the word of Jesus Christ ought 
to render you blind, as I may say, to the defects of those who 
announce it to you; in a mouth even rude and unpolished, you 
ought to find it lovely, divine, and worthy of all your homage; in 
whatever shape it be presented to you, decked with pompous orna- 
ments, or simple and neglected, provided that its celestial traits 
are still to be recognized, it preserves the same rights over your 
heart. And, indeed, is any portion of its sanctity lost by pass- 
ing through less brilliant and less copious channels? Did the 
holy word of the Lord lose any thing of its dignity, whether he 
formerly gave it out from a bush, mean and despicable to the 
sight, or from a cloud of glory; whether he gave out his oracles 
in the midst of the desert, and in a tabernacle covered with the 
skins of animals, or in the temple of Solomon, the most magni- 
ficent which hath ever been raised up to the glory of his name? 
And did the faith of Israel make any distinction, when it was 
the same Lord who everywhere spake? 

Nevertheless, how few among all those who listen to us, who 
do not constitute themselves judges and censurers of the holy 
word ! They come here merely for the purpose of deciding on 
the merit of those who announce it, of drawing foolish compa- 
risons, of pronouncing on the difference of the lights and of the 
instructions; they think it an honour the being difficult to please; 
they pass without attention over the most striking truths, and 
which might be of the most essential benefit to all ; and the only" 
fruit reaped by them from a Christian discourse is confined to 
the miserable pride of having, better than any other, remarked 
its defects. This is so truly the case, that we may with justice 
apply to the greatest part of our hearers what Joseph, become 
the preserver of Egypt, said, through pure artifice, to his breth- 
ren: It is not to seek food that you are come here; it is as spies, 
to see the nakedness of the land. It is not to nourish yourselves 
with the bread of the word, or to seek assistance and efficacious 
remedies for your evils, that you come to listen to us; it is in 
order to find out cause for applying some vain censures, and to 
show your skill in remarking our defects; which defects are per- 
haps a terrible punishment upon you of the Lord, who, in conse- 
quence of your crimes, refuseth more accomplished labourers in 
his vineyard, who would have been enabled to recal you to re- 
pentance. 

But candidly, my brethren, however weak our language may 
be, do we not always say enough to overthrow you, to dissipate 
your errors, and to make you inwardly confess irregularities 
which you are unable to justify to yourselves? Are such sublime 
talents required to tell you that fornicators, extortioners, and 
men without mercy, shall never enter the kingdom of God; that 
unless you become penitent you shall perish; and that it mat- 
ters little to become masters of the whole world, if you thereby 
lose your soul? Is it not, in fact, that very simplicity which con- 



£82 



THE WORD OF GOD. [Serm. XVI. 



stitutes the whole force, and gives such energy to these divine 
truths? And ought they to he less alarming to the criminal souls, 
though in the mouth of the most ohscure individual of the minis- 
try? 

And besides, granting that it were here permitted us to recom- 
mend ourselves, as the apostle formerly said to ungrateful believ- 
ers, more attentive to censure the simplicity of his appearance 
and of his language, and, as he says himself, his contemptible 
figure in the eyes of men, than touched with the endless fatigues 
and dangers which he had surmounted, in order to announce to 
them the gospel, and to convert them to truth; were it permitted 
we might say to you, my brethren, we sustain, solely on your 
account, the whole weight of a painful and laborious ministry; 
our cares, our watchings, our prayers, the endless toilings which 
qualify us for, and accompany us in these Christian pulpits, have 
no other object but that of your salvation. O ! do not our pains 
entitle us at least to your respect and gratitude? Is it possible 
that that zeal which suffers all, in order to secure your salvation, 
can ever become the melancholy subject of your derisions and 
censures? Demand of God, good and well, that, for the glory 
of the church and for the honour of his gospel, he raise up to 
his people labourers powerful in speech, of those men whom the 
sole unction of the Spirit of God renders nervous and eloquent, 
and who announce the gospel in a manner worthy of its elevation 
and sanctity. But likewise demand, that, when we happen 
therein to fail, your faith may supply the deficiencies of our dis- 
courses; that your piety may render the truth, in your own hearts, 
that which it loses in our mouths; and that, through your 
unrighteous distastes, you force not the ministers of the gospel 
to have recourse, in order to please you, to the vain artifices 
and colouring of a human eloquence, to shine rather than to 
instruct, and, like the Israelites formerly, to go down to the 
Philistines to sharpen their instruments, destined solely to cul- 
tivate the earth: I mean to say, to seek in profane learning, or 
in the language of a hostile world, foreign ornaments to em- 
bellish the simplicity of the gospel; and to give to instruments, 
and to talents destined to increase, to multiply, and to strengthen 
the holy seed, a vain brilliancy and a subtilty which blunt its 
energy and its virtue, and which substitute a false splendour in 
the place of truth and zeal. 

And now, my brethren, behold the last fault inimical to that 
spirit of faith; it is a spirit of curiosity. You do not sufficient- 
ly distinguish the holy gravity of our ministry from that vain 
and frivolous art which has nothing in view but the arrange- 
ment of the discourse and the glory of eloquence; you assist at 
our discourses with the same view as Augustin, still a sinner, did 
in former times at those of Ambrose. It was not, says that il- 
lustrious penitent, in order to learn from the mouth of the man 
of God the secrets of eternal life, which I had so long sought. 



Serm.XVL] THE WORD OF GOB. 



283 



nor the desire of finding in them remedies for the shameful and 
inveterate wounds of my soul, and which thou, O my God! 
alone art acquainted with; it was in order to examine whether 
his eloquence corresponded with his great reputation, and if his 
discourses warranted the unbounded applauses which his hearers 
bestowed upon him. The truths which he announced interest- 
ed me not; I was moved only by the beauty and the charms of 
the discourse. 

And such is still, at present, the deplorable situation of far 
too many believers who listen to us; who, like Augustin, load- 
ed with crimes, and fettered with the most shameful passions, 
far from coming here to seek remedies for their evils, come in 
search of vain ornaments, which amuse without curing the afflict- 
ed, which are the means of our pleasing the sinner, but have no 
influence towards making the sinner displeased with himself. 
They come here, it would appear, to say to us what the inhabi- 
tants of Babylon formerly said to the captive Israelites, " Sing 
us one of the songs of Zion." They come in search of harmony 
and delight, in the serious and important truths of the morality 
of Jesus Christ; in the sighs of the sorrowful Zion." captive in 
a strange land; and require of us that we flatter the ear, while 
publishing the threatenings and the rigid maxims of the gospel. 

O ! you who now listen to me, and whom this discourse re- 
gards, reflect for a moment, I entreat of you, upon yourselves; 
your case is, as it were, desperate in the eyes of God; your 
wounds become virulent through their long-standing, no longer 
leave almost a hope of cure; your evils press; time is short; 
God, wearied with having so long borne with you, is at last on 
the point of striking and of surprising you: behold the eternal 
miseries which we foretel to you, and which happen every day 
to your equals. You are not far distant from the fulfilment; 
we show you the terrible sword of the Lord suspended over 
your head, and ready to fall upon you; and, far from shudder- 
ing at the after part of your destiny, or taking any measures 
to avoid the impending blow, you childishly amuse yourselves 
in examining whether it shine and have a lustre; and you search, 
even in the terrors of the prediction, for the puerile beauties of 
a vain eloquence. Great God ! how despicable and how worthy 
of derision doth the sinner appear when we view him through 
thy light! 

For, my brethren, are we then here upon a profane tribunal, 
for the purpose of courting, with artificial words, the suffrages 
of an idle assembly, or in a Christian pulpit, and in the place 
of Jesus Christ, to instruct, to reprove, and to sanctify you in 
the name, and under the eyes of him who sends us: Is it here 
a dispute for worldly fame, an idle exercise of the faculties, or 
the most holy and the most important ministry of faith? O! 
why do you come to loiter away with our feeble talents, or to 
seek human qualifications where God alone speaketh and acteth? 



284 ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. [Serm. XVII. 



Are not the humblest instruments the most suitable to the 
mightiness of his grace? Do not the walls of Jericho fall when 
he pleaseth, at the sound of the weakest trumpets? O! what 
matters it to us that we please, if we do not change you? Of 
what consequence is it to us the being eloquent if you continue 
always sinners? What fruit can we reap from your applauses, 
if you reap none yourselves from our instructions? Our only 
praise, our only glory, is the establishment of the reign of God 
in your hearts; your tears alone, much rather than your ap- 
plauses, can prove our eulogium; and we covet no other crown 
than yourselves, and your eternal salvation. 



SERMON XVII. 
ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. 
John i. 23. 

/ am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the 
way of the Lord. 

It is that he may enter into our hearts that Jesus Christ an- 
nounces, by John the Baptist, that we have the way to make 
straight for him, by removing all those obstacles, which, like a 
wall of separation, rise up betwixt his mercy and our wretched- 
ness. Now, these obstacles are the crimes with which we so 
often stain ourselves, which always subsist because it would be 
necessary to expiate them by penitence, and we expiate them 
not: these obstacles are the passions by which our heart fool- 
ishly allows itself to be carried away, which are always living, 
because, in order to destroy, it would be necessary to conquer 
them; and we never conquer them: these obstacles are the 
occasions against which our innocence hath so often split, and 
which are still every day the rock fatal to all our resolutions, 
because, in place of yielding to that inward inclination which 
leads us towards them, it would be necessary to shun them, 
and we shun them not: in a word, the true and only manner 
of making straight the way of our hearts for Jesus Christ, is 
that of changing our life, and of being sincerely converted. 

But, though the business of our conversion be the most im- 
portant with which we can be intrusted here below, seeing 
that through it alone we can draw Jesus Christ into our hearts; 
though it be the only one truly interesting to us, since on it 
depends our eternal happiness; yet, O deplorable blindness! 
it is never considered by us as a matter either of urgency or 



Se#m. XVII.] OF THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. 285 



of importance; it is continually put off to some other time, as 
if times and seasons were at our disposal. What wait you, 
Christians, my brethren? Jesus Christ ceaseth not to forewarn 
you, by his ministers, of the evils which threaten your impeni- 
tence, and the delay of your conversion; he hath long announ- 
ced to you, through our mouth, that, unless you repent, you 
most assuredly shall perish. 

Nor is he satisfied with publicly warning you through the 
voice of his ministers; he speaks to you in the bottom of your 
hearts, and continually whispers to you, Is it not time now to 
withdraw yourself from that guilt in which, for so many years, 
you have been plunged, and from which almost nothing but 
a miracle can now extricate you? Is it not time to restore peace 
to your hearts, to banish from it that chaos of passions which has 
occasioned all the misfortunes of your life; to prepare for your- 
self at least some few happy and tranquil days, and, after having 
lived so long for a world which hath always left you empty and 
uneasy, at last to live for a God who alone can give peace and 
tranquillity to your heart? Will you not at last bestow a thought 
upon your eternal interests, and, after a life wholly frivolous, 
return to the true one; and, in serving God, adopt the only 
wise plan which man can pursue upon the earth? Are you not 
wearied out with struggling against those remorses which tear 
you, that sadness of guilt which weighs you down, that empti- 
ness of the world which everywhere pursues you? And do you 
not wish to finish at last your misfortunes and your disquietudes, 
by finishing your crimes. 

What shall we reply to that inward monitor which hath so 
long spoken in the bottom of our hearts? What pretexts shall 
we oppose? 1st, That we are not, as yet, furnished by God, 
with the succours necessary to enable us to quit the unhappy 
state in which we live. 2dly, That we are at present too much 
engaged by the passions to think of a new life. That is to say, 
that we start two pretexts for delaying our conversion; the first 
drawn from the part of God, the second from within ourselves. 
The first which justifies us, by accusing God of being wanting 
to us; the second which comforts us, by alleging to ourselves 
our inability of, as yet, returning to him. Thus we delay our 
conversion, under the belief that grace is wanting, and that, as 
yet, God desireth us not; we delay our conversion, because we 
flatter ourselves that some future day we shall be less attached 
to the world and to the passions, and more in a situation to be- 
gin a Christian and an orderly life: Two pretexts which are 
continually in the mouth of sinners, and which I now mean to 
overthrow. 

Part L It is not of to-day that men have dared to accuse 
even God himself for their transgressions, and have tried to 
render his wisdom and his goodness responsible for their ini- 



286 ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. [Serm. XVII. 



quitous weaknesses. It may be said that this blindness entered 
with sin into the world; the first man sought not elsewhere an 
excuse for his guilt; and, far from appeasing the Lord whom 
he had so lately disobeyed, by a humble confession of his 
wretchedness, he accused him of having been himself the cause 
of his disobedience, in associating with him the woman. 

And such, my brethren, is the illusion of almost all souls 
living in guilt, and who delay to a future day that conversion 
required of them by God. They are continually repeating that 
conversion does not depend upon us; that it is the Lord who 
must change their heart, and bestow upon them that faith and 
grace which they, as yet, have not. Thus they are not satisfied 
with provoking his anger, by delaying their conversion; they 
even insult him, by laying upon him the blame of their obstinacy 
and of the delay of their penitence. Let us now overthrow 
the error and the impiety of this disposition; and, in order to 
render the criminal soul more inexcusable in his impenitence, 
let us deprive him at least of the pretext. 

You tell us, then, 1st, that if you had faith, and were tho- 
roughly convinced of the truth of religion, you would be con- 
verted; but that faith is a gift of God which you expect from 
him alone, and that as soon as he shall have given it to you, 
you will easily and heartily begin to adopt our party. First 
pretext; the want of faith, and it is God alone who can give it. 

But I ought first to ask you, How have you then lost that 
faith so precious? You have received it in your baptism; a 
Christian education hath cherished it in your heart; it had 
grown up with you; it was an inestimable talent which the Lord 
had intrusted to you in discerning you from so many infidel 
nations, and in marking you, from the moment you quitted your 
mother's womb, with the seal of salvation. What have you then 
done with the gift of God? Who hath effaced from your fore- 
head that sign of eternal election? Is it not the corruption of 
the passions, and that blindness which has been their just pu- 
nishment? Did you suspect the faith of your fathers before you 
became dissolute and abandoned? Is it not yourself who hath 
extinguished in the dirt that celestial torch, which the church, 
in regenerating you, had placed in your hand, to enlighten your 
way through the obscurities and the dangers of this life? Why 
then accuse God of that waste which you have made of his fa- 
vours? His is the right of reclaiming his own gift; to him it 
belongs to make you accountable for the talent which he had 
intrusted to your care; to say to you, " Wicked and ungrate- 
ful servant, what had I done for others that I had not done for 
thee? I had embellished thy soul with the gift of faith, and with 
the -mark of my children; thou hast cast that precious jewel 
before unclean animals; thou hast extinguished faith, and the 
light that I had placed within thee; I have long, in spite of thy- 
self, preserved it in thy heart; I have caused it to outlive all 



Serm. XVII.] ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION- 287 



the impious efforts, which, because it was become troublesome 
to thy debaucheries, thou hast made to extinguish it; thou 
knowest how much it hath cost thee to throw off* the yoke of 
faith, and to be what thou now art; and this dreadful state, 
which is the justest punishment of thy crimes, should now be- 
come their only excuse? And thou sayest that the want of faith 
is no fault of thine, seeing it depends not on man, thou, who 
hast had such difficulty in tearing it from the bottom of thy 
soul? And thou pretendest that it is me who ought to give it 
to thee, if I wish thee to serve me, I, who reclaim it from thee, 
and who so justly complain that thou hast lost it?" Enter into 
judgment with your Lord, and justify yourself, if you have any 
reply to make to him. 

And to make you, my dear hearer, more sensible of all the 
weakness of this pretext; you complain that you want faith; 
you say that you would wish to have it; that happy are those 
who are feelingly convinced, and that, in that state, no suffering 
can affect them. But, if you wish for faith, if you believe that 
nothing is so fortunate as that of being truly convinced of the 
truths of salvation, and of the allusion of all that passeth away; 
if you envy the lot of those souls who have attained to that de- 
sirable state; if this be, behold then that faith which you await, 
and which you thought to have lost. What more do you re- 
quire to know, in order to terminate a criminal life, than the 
happiness of those who have forsaken it, to labour towards their 
salvation? You say that you would wish faith; but you have 
it from the moment that you think it worthy of a wish; at least 
you have enough of it to know that the greatest happiness of 
man is that of sacrificing all to its promises. Now, the souls 
whom we daily see returning to their God, are not led by other 
lights: the righteous, who bear his yoke, are not sustained or 
animated by other truths ; we ourselves, who serve him, know 
nothing more of it. / 

Cease then to deceive yourself, and to await what you already 
have. Ah ! it is not faith that is wanting to you, it is the in- 
clination to fulfil the duties it imposes on you: it is not your 
doubts, but your passions which stop you. You know not your- 
self; you willingly persuade yourself that you want faith, be- 
cause that pretext which you oppose to grace is less humiliating 
to self-love than that of the shameful vices which retain you. 
But mount to the source; your doubts have sprung solely 
from your irregular mode of living: regulate then your man- 
ners, and you will see nothing in faith but what is certain and 
consoling: be chaste, modest, and temperate, and I answer for 
that faith which you believe to have lost: live uprightly, and 
you will find little difficulty in believing. 

And a proof of the truth of what I tell you is, that if, in order 
to be converted, nothing more were to be required than to bend 
your reason to mysteries which exceed our comprehension; if a 



288 ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. [Serm. XVII. 



Christian life were accompanied with no other difficulties than 
certain apparent contradictions which it is necessary to believe 
without being able to comprehend them; if faith proposed the 
fulfilment of no irksome duties; if, in order to change your life, 
it were not necessary to renounce passions the most lively, and 
attachments the most dear to your heart; if the matter in ques- 
tion were merely a point of opinion and of belief, without either 
the heart or the passions being interested in it, you would not 
longer have the smallest difficulty in yielding to it; you would 
view in the light of madmen those who, for a moment, could 
hesitate betwixt difficulties of pure speculation, of which the be- 
lief can be followed by no injury, and an eternity of misery, 
which, after all, may be the lot of unbelievers. Faith appears 
difficult to you, therefore, not because it holds out mysteries, but 
because it regulates the passions: it is the sanctity of its maxims 
which shocks, and not the incomprehensibility of its secrets: 
you are therefore corrupted, but not an unbeliever. 

And, in effect, notwithstanding all your pretended doubts 
upon faith, you feel that avowed unbelief is a horrible cause to 
adopt; you dare not determine upon it: it is a quicksand, under 
which you have a glimpse of a thousand gulfs which fill you with 
horror, in which you find no consistency, and on which you 
could not venture to tread with a firm and confident foot: you 
continually say to yourself that there is no risk in devoting one's 
self to God; that, after all, and even admitting the uncertainty 
of any thing after this life, the alternative is too horrible not to 
require precautions, and that, even in an actual uncertainty of 
the truths of faith, the part of the godly would always be 
the wisest and the safest. Your state, therefore, is rather the 
vague determination of an agitated heart, which dreads to break 
its chains, than a real and actual suspicion of faith, and a 
fear lest, in sacrificing to it all your iniquitous pleasures, your 
pains and time should be lost; your uncertainties are efforts 
which you make to defend yourself against a remnant of faith, 
which still inwardly enlightens you, rather than a proof that 
you have already lost it. Seek no longer then to convince your- 
self; rather endeavour to oppose no more that internal convic- 
tion which enlightens and condemns you. Follow the dictates 
of your own heart; be reconciled to yourself; allow a conscience 
to speak, Avhich never fails to plead within you for faith, against 
your own excesses; in a word, hearken to yourself and you will 
be a believer. 

But it is admitted, you will say, that if nothing more were to 
be required than to believe, that would easily be subscribed to. 
This is the second pretext of the sinners who delay; it is the 
want of grace, and they await it: conversion is not the work of 
man, and it belongs to God alone to change the heart. 

Now, I say that this pretext, so vulgar, so often repeated in 
the world, and so continually in the mouth of almost all those 



Serm. XVIL] ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. 289 



who live in guilt; if we consider the sinner who alleges it, it is 
unjust; if we view it on the part of God, on whom he lays the 
blame, it is rash and ungrateful; if we examine it in itself, it is 
foolish and unwarrantable. 

In the first place, if we consider the sinner who alleges it, it 
is unjust; for you complain that God hath not yet touched you, 
that you feel no relish for devotion, and that you must wait the 
coming of that relish before you can think of changing your life. 
But, full of passions as you are, can you reasonably expect or 
exact of God that he shall ever make you to feel a decided in- 
clination for piety? Would you that your heart, still plunged 
in debauchery, feel the pure delights and the chaste attractions 
of virtue? You are similar to a man who, nourishing himself 
with gall and wormwood, should afterwards complain that every 
thing feels bitter to his palate. You say that if God wish you 
to serve him, in his power alone it is to give you a relish for his 
service; you who every day defile your heart by the meanest 
excesses; you who every moment place a fresh chaos betwixt 
God and you ; you in a word, who, by new debaucheries, finally 
extinguish in your soul even those sentiments of natural virtue, 
those happy impressions of innocence and of regularity born with 
you, which might have been the means of recalling you to virtue 
and to righteousness. O man ! art thou then unjust only when 
there is question of accusing the wisdom and the justice of thy 
God? 

But I say farther, that were God even to operate in your 
heart that relish for, and those feelings of, salvation which you 
await, dissolute and corrupted as you are, would you even feel 
the operation of his grace? Were he to call upon you, plunged 
as you now are in the pleasures of a life altogether worldly, 
would you eA^en hear his voice? Were he to touch your heart, 
would that feeling of grace have any consequence for your con- 
version, extinguished as it would immediately be by the ardour 
and the frenzy of profane passions? And, after all, this God of 
longanimity and of patience still operateth in your heart; he 
still poureth out within you the riches of his goodness and of 
his mercy. Ah! it is not his grace which fails you, but you 
receive it into a heart so full of corruption and wretchedness, 
that it is ineffectual; it excites no feeling there of contrition; it 
is a spark which, falling into a sink of filth and of nastiness, is 
extinguished the moment it falls. 

Reflect then, my dear hearer, and comprehend all the injus- 
tice of your pretexts. You complain that God is wanting to 
you, and that you await his grace to be converted; but is there 
a sinner in whose mouth that complaint would be more unjust 
than from your lips? Recal here the whole course of your life; 
follow it from the earliest period down to this day. The Lord 
had anticipated you from your birth with his blessings; he had 
placed in you a happy disposition, a noble spirit, and all the in- 

T 



290 ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. [Serm. XVII. 



clinations most favourable to virtue; he had even provided for 
you, in the bosom of a family, domestic succours and pious and 
godly examples. The mercies of the Lord went still farther; 
he hath preserved you from a thousand dangers; through his 
goodness you have outlived occasions where your friends, and 
perhaps the accomplices of your debaucheries, have fallen a 
sacrifice to the scourge of war. To recal you to him he hath 
spared neither afflictions, disgusts, nor disgraces; he hath torn 
from you the criminal objects of your passions, even at the mo- 
ment when your heart was most strongly attached to them ; he 
hath so mercifully conducted your destiny that a thousand ob- 
stacles have continually thwarted your passions, that you have 
never been able to arrive at the accomplishment of all your crimi- 
nal wishes, and that something has always been wanting to your 
iniquitous happiness; he has formed for you serious engage- 
ments and duties, which, in spite of yourself, have imposed the 
obligation of a prudent and regular life in the eyes of men; he 
has not permitted your conscience to become hardened in ini- 
quity, and you have never been able to succeed in calming your 
remorses, or in living tranquilly in guilt; not a day hath past in 
which you have not felt the emptiness of the world and the hor- 
ror of your situation ; amidst all your pleasures and excesses, 
conscience hath awoke, and you have never succeeded in lulling 
your secret disquiets but by promising to yourself a future 
change. A just and a merciful God urges and pursues you 
every where: ever since you have forsaken him, he has fixed 
himself to you said a prophet, like a worm which burrows in 
the vestment, continually to gnaw your heart, and to render 
the importunity of his biting a wholesome remedy to your soul. 
Even while I am now speaking to you, he worketh within you, 
filleth my mouth with these holy truths, and placeth me here to 
proclaim them to you, for the sole purpose of recalling perhaps 
you alone. What then is your whole life but one continued 
succession of favours? Who are you yourself but a child of 
dilection and the work of God's mercies? Unjust that thou 
art! And thou darest, after this, to complain that his grace is 
wanting, thou, on whom alone on the earth the Lord seemeth to 
cast his regards; thou, in whose heart he so continually ope- 
rateth, as though of all men, he had only thee to save; thou, 
in a word, whose every moment is a fresh grace, and whose 
greatest guilt shall one day be, that of having received too many, 
and of having constantly abused them. 

But, to finish your overthrow, upon what grounds do you say 
that you want grace? You doubtless say so, because you feel 
that in your present state conversion would require too many 
sacrifices; but you then believe that, with grace, you are con- 
verted without any sacrifice on your part, without any self-de- 
nial, and almost without being sensible of it yourself? You 
believe, then, that to have grace is to have no more passions to 



Serm. XVIL] ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. 291 



conquer, no more chains to break, no more temptations to over- 
come; that it is to be regenerated through penitence, without 
tears, pain, or sorrow? Ah! I assure you that on this footing 
you will never possess that chimerical grace, for conversion must 
always require many sacrifices; be the grace what it may, you 
will always be required to make heroical efforts to repress your 
passions, to tear yourself from the most beloved objects, and to 
sacrifice every thing which may yet captivate you. Look around, 
and see if no sacrifices are required of those who are daily re- 
turning to their God; yet they are favoured with grace, since 
it is it which delivers them and changes their heart. Inquire 
at them if grace render every thing easy and smooth; if it leave 
nothing more for self-love to undergo. Ask at them if they 
have not had a thousand struggles to sustain, a thousand ob- 
stacles to overcome, a thousand passions to moderate, and you 
will know if to have grace is to be converted without any exer- 
tion on your part. Conversion is therefore a painful sacrifice, 
a laborious baptism, a grievous delivery, a victory which sup- 
poses combats and fatigues. Grace, I confess, softens them all; 
but it by no means operates so as to leave nothing more to over- 
come ; and if, in order to change your life, you await a grace of 
that nature, I declare to you that such never existed, and that so 
absurdly to await your salvation and deliverance, is to be abso- 
lutely bent upon perishing. 

But, if the pretext of the default of grace be unjust on the 
side of the sinner who alleges it, it is not less rash and ungrate- 
ful with regard to God, on whom he pretends to fix the blame. 

For you say that God is the master, and that, when he shall 
want you, he will perfectly know how to find you; that is to 
say, that you have only to leave him solely to act, and that, 
without giving yourself any trouble with respect to your salva- 
tion, he when so inclined, will know how to change your heart; 
that is to say, that you have only to pass your life in pleasures 
and in guilt, and that, without any interference on your part, 
without your bestowing even a thought upon it, without bring- 
ing to that conversion, which you expect, other preparation than 
a whole life of debauchery and constant opposition to his grace, 
he will know how to acquire you, when his moment shall be 
come; that is to say, that your salvation, that grand, that only 
business which you have upon the earth, is no longer a concern 
of yours; and that the Lord, who hath given you that alone to 
manage, who hath commanded you to give it the preference 
over all others, and even to neglect every other in order to de- 
vote yourself to it alone, has nevertheless absolutely discharged 
you from the trust, in order to take it wholly upon himself. 
Show us then this promise in some new gospel, for you well 
know that it is nowhere to be found in that of Jesus Christ. 
" The sinner," says the prophet Isaiah, " hath nothing but 
foolish things wherewith to justify himself; and his heart work- 



292 ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. [Serm. XVII. 



eth iniquity, to practice hypocrisy, and to utter error against 
the Lord." 

Lastly, This pretext is foolish in itself, for you say that you 
want grace: I have already replied that you deceive yourself; 
that, if candid, you will acknowledge that grace has never been 
wanting to you; that you have more than once felt its salutary 
impressions; that had so obstinate a resistance not been op- 
posed by your hardness of heart and impenitence, it would have 
triumphed over your passions; that God, who wishes all men 
to be saved, who out of nothing has drawn reasonable beings, 
solely to praise, to bless, and to glorify him; in a word who 
has only made us for himself, has opened to you, my dear 
hearer, as well as to so many other sinners, a thousand ways of 
conversion, which would have infallibly recalled you ere now to 
the right path, had you not obstinately shut your ears against 
his voice. You want grace, you say: well, what do you thereby 
pretend? Would it be to have it understood that God who is 
our Father, and of whom we are the children, who has an affec- 
tion for us infinitely surpassing that of the tender est mother for 
an only son, that a God so good leaves us, through want of as- 
sistance, in the actual impossibility of well-doing? But do you 
reflect that such language would be a blasphemy against the 
wisdom of God, and the justification of every crime? Are you 
then ignorant, that whatever be the blow given to our liberty 
by the fall of our first parent, it is still however left to us; that 
neither law nor duties would longer be imposed upon man, had 
he not the real and actual power of fulfilling them; that reli- 
gion, far from being an aid and a consolation, would conse- 
quently be no longer but a vexation and a snare; that if, not- 
withstanding all the cares which God has for our salvation, we 
perish, it is always the fault of our own will, and not the de- 
fault of grace; that we are individually the authors of our 
misery and destruction; that it has depended upon ourselves to 
have avoided them; and that a thousand sinners, with neither 
more grace nor succours than we, have broken their chains, 
and have rendered glory to God and to his mercies by a life 
altogether new. 

But, granting that these truths were less certain, and that, 
in reality, you, my dear hearer, want grace, it would equally be 
true then that God had altogether forsaken you; that you are 
marked with a character of reprobation, and that your state 
cannot be worse: For to be without grace is surely the most 
terrible of all situations, and the most certain presage of eternal 
condemnation. And it is that horrible thought, however, which 
comforts you, which justifies in your eyes your tranquillity in 
guilt, which makes you, without trouble or remorse, to delay 
your conversion, and which eyen serves as an excuse for all 
your excesses: that is to say, that you are delighted in the want 



Serm. XVIL] ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. 293 



of this precious grace; that you continually say, with satisfac- 
tion to yourself, God wishes me not as yet; I have only to live, 
in the meanwhile, tranquilly in guilt; his grace will not come 
yet awhile; that is to say, that you wish it not, and that you 
would even be sorry were it to come to break those chains which 
you still love. To you, the want of grace ought to be the most 
fearful and the most powerful inducement to extricate yourself 
from your deplorable state, and it is the only one which quiets 
and stops you. 

Besides, the more you delay the less will you have of grace; 
for the more you delay the more do your crimes increase, the 
more does God estrange himself from you; his mercies wear 
out, his moments of indulgence slip away, your measure be- 
comes full, and the dreadful term of his wrath approaches; and 
if it be true that you have not at present sufficient grace to be 
converted, you will not, in a little time, have wherewithal even 
to comprehend that you have occasion either for penitence or 
conversion. 

It is not grace then that you have to accuse, it is yourself. 
Did Augustin, during his feeble desires of conversion, tax the 
Lord with the delay of his penitence? Ah ! he went no further 
for the reason of it than in the weakness and licentiousness of 
his own heart. " I dragged on," said he, " a heart diseased 
and torn with remorse, accusing myself alone for all my evils, 
and for all the delays which I started against a new life. I 
turned me in my chains, as though they should break off them- 
selves, without any effort on my part. For thee, Lord, never 
hast thou ceased to chastise my heart with inward sorrows, con- 
tinually operating there, through a merciful severity, the most 
pungent remorses, which embittered every comfort of my life. 
Nevertheless, the amusements of the world, which I had always 
and still loved, withheld me; they secretly whispered to me, 
Thou meanest, then, to renounce every pleasure? From this 
moment, then, thou biddest an eternal farewell to all that hath 
hitherto rendered life agreeable to thee? What! shall it no 
more be permitted to thee to see those persons who have been so 
dear to thee; thou shalt henceforth be separated from thy com- 
panions in pleasure, be banished from their assemblies, and be 
obliged to deny thyself the most innocent delights, and all the 
comforts of society? And is it possible that thou canst believe 
thyself capable of supporting the sad weariness of a life so 
gloomy, so void, so uniform, and so different from the one thou 
hast hitherto led?" 

Behold where this half-contrite sinner found the reasons of 
his delays and of his resistance; it was the dread of having to 
renounce his passions, and of being unable to support the step 
of a new life, and not any default of grace : and such is pre- 
cisely the situation in which you are, and what you say every 
day to yourself. 



294 ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. [Serm. XVIL 



For, after all, supposing that grace is wanting to you, what 
do you thence conclude? That the crimes into which you con- 
tinually plunge yourself will not condemn you should death sur- 
prise you in that deplorable state? You would not dare to say 
so. That you have only to live tranquil in your debaucheries 
till God shall touch you, and till grace shall be given to you? 
But it is the height of folly to expect grace while you render 
yourself every day more and more unworthy of it. That you 
are not guilty before God of the delay of your conversion, see- 
ing it depends not on you ! But all delaying sinners who die 
impenitent would then be justified, and hell would no longer be 
but for the just who are converted. That you ought no more 
to concern yourself with your salvation, but to leave it to chance, 
without giving yourself any uneasiness or trouble with regard 
to it? But that is the resolution of impiety and despair. That 
the moment of your conversion is marked, and that a little more 
or less of debauchery will neither advance nor retard it an in- 
stant ! But, according to that doctrine, you have only to pierce 
your heart or plunge yourself into the waves, under the pretext 
that the moment of your death is determined, and that such 
madness will neither hasten nor retard it a single instant. " O 
man !" cries the apostle, in replying to the folly and impiety of 
this pretext, "is it thus that thou contemnest the riches of the 
goodness of thy God? Art thou ignorant that his patience in 
suffering thy debaucheries, far from authorising them, ought to 
recal thee to penitence; and, nevertheless, it is his long for- 
bearance itself which hardens thee in guilt; and through thine 
obstinacy of heart thou amass est an overflowing treasure of 
wrath for that terrible day which shall surprise thee, and on 
which shall be rendered to every one according to his works?" 

The only rational consequence, therefore, that you could be 
permitted to draw, supposing that grace is wanting to you, is, 
that you, more earnestly than any other, ought to pray to ob- 
tain it; to neglect nothing to soften an irritated God, who has 
withdrawn himself from your heart; to overcome by your im- 
portunities his resistance; to remove, in the meanwhile, what- 
ever removes his grace from your heart; to make straight the 
way for him; to throw aside all the obstacles which have 
hitherto rendered it ineffectual to you; to deny yourself every 
opportunity in which your innocence almost always finds new 
rocks, and which completely shut your heart against the holy 
inspirations: such is the Christian and prudent manner of ren- 
dering glory to God, of confessing that he alone is the master 
of hearts, and that every blessing and gift proceed from him. 
But to say, as you continually do, without changing in any re- 
spect your disorderly manners, " When God shall want me he 
knoweth how to find me," is to say. " I wish him not as yet; 
I have no occasion for him; I live happy and contented; when 
he shall force me, and I can no longer avoid him, then I will 



Serm. XVIL] ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. 295 



yield; but, in the meantime, I will enjoy my prosperity, and 
the privilege which he granteth to me of delaying my conver- 
sion." What a shocking preparation for that precious grace 
which changeth the heart ! Such is, however, all that an im- 
penitent soul can adduce for confidently awaiting it. 

Such are the pretexts which the sinner who delays his con- 
version draws from the part of God. Let us now examine those 
which he takes from within himself, 

Part II. It is astonishing, my brethren, that life being so 
short, the moment of death so uncertain, every instant so pre- 
cious, conversions so rare, the examples of those who are taken 
unawares so frequent, and futurity so awful, so many frivolous 
pretexts can be urged for delaying a change of life. In all 
other dangers which threaten either our life, our honour, or our 
property, the precautions are prompt and ready, the danger 
alone is dubious and distant; here the danger is certain and 
present, and the precautions are always uncertain and remote. 
It seems either that salvation is an arbitrary thing, or that our 
life is in our own hands, or that the time for our penitence hath 
been promised to us, or that to die impenitent is no great mis- 
fortune, so strongly do all sinners lull themselves in this hope 
of being one day converted, without ever attempting a change 
of life. And what is still more incomprehensible in the delay 
of their penitence is, that they all admit of the necessity of their 
conversion, of the bad state of their conscience, and that they 
all consider as the worst of evils, that of dying in that fatal 
state; and, nevertheless, that they all defer withdrawing from 
it, under pretexts so childish* that even the gravity of the Chris- 
tian pulpit suffers in refuting and overthrowing them. 

Age, the passions, the consequences of a change of life, which 
they dread the being able to support; such are the vain pretexts 
inwardly alleged for delaying that conversion which God demands 
of us. 

I say, in the first place, The age. They wish to allow the years 
of youth to pass away, to which a consideration so important as 
piety seems little suited; they wait a certain season of life, when, 
the bloom of youth effaced, the manners become more sedate, the 
attention more exact, the world less watchful upon us, even the 
mind riper and more capable of supporting that grand undertak- 
ing; they promise themselves to labour at it, and that they will 
not then allow any thing to divert them from it. 

But, it would be natural to ask you first, who hath told you 
that you shall arrive at the term which you mark to yourself; 
that death shall not surprise you in the course of those years 
which you still allot to the world and to the passions; and that 
the Lord, whom you do not expect till the evening, shall not ar- 
rive in the morning, and when you least think of it? Is youth 
a certain safeguard against death? See, without mentioning here 



296 ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. [Serm. XVII. 



what happens every day to the rest of men, if even in confining 
yourself to the small number of your friends and of your re- 
lations, you shall find none for whom the justice of God hath 
dug a grave in the first years of their course; who, like the 
flower of the field blooming to the morn, have withered before 
the close of day, and have left you only the melancholy regret 
of seeing, so speedily blasted, a life of which the blossoms had 
promised so fair. Fool! Thy soul is to be redemanded perhaps 
at the opening of thy race; and those projects of conversion, 
which thou deferrest to a future period, what shall they avail 
thee? And those grand resolutions, which thou promisest to 
thyself to put in execution one day, what shall they change in 
thine eternal misery, should death anticipate them, as it every 
day doth in a thousand instances and leave thee only the una- 
vailing regret of having vainly formed them ? 

But, even granting that death shall not take you unawares, 
and I ask you, upon what foundation do you promise yourself, 
that age shall change your heart, and incline you more than you 
are at present to a new life? Did age change the heart of Solomon? 
Ah ! It was then that his passions rose to the highest, and that 
his shameful frailty no longer knew any bounds. Did age pre- 
pare Saul for his conversion? Ah! It was then that, to his past 
errors, he added superstition, impiety, hardness of heart, and 
despair. Perhaps in advancing in age you shall leave off certain 
loose manners, because the disgust alone which follows them 
shall have withdrawn you from them; but you will not thereby 
be converted: You will no longer live in debauchery; but you 
will not repent, you will not do penance, your heart will not be 
changed: You will still be worldly, ambitious, voluptuous, and 
sensual: You will five tranquil in that state, because you will 
no longer have but all the dispositions of these vices, without 
giving yourself up to their excesses. Years, examples, long 
habit of the world, shall have served only to harden your con- 
science, to substitute indolence and a worldly wisdom in the 
room of the passions, and to efface that sense of religion, which, 
in the youthful period of life, is left in the soul as yet fearful and 
timorous; you will die impenitent. 

And, if you suppose this to be merely a movement of zeal and 
not a truth founded on experience, examine what passes every 
day before you; view all the souls who have grown old in the 
world, and who, through age alone, have withdrawn from its 
pleasures ; the love of the world is extinguished only with them 
under different exteriors, and which are changed solely through 
decency: you see the same relish for the world, the same in- 
clination, the same ardour for pleasures, a youthful heart in a 
changed and worn out body. The delight of our younger years 
are recalled with satisfaction; the imagination dwells upon, and 
delights in reviving all that time and age have wrested from us; 
a blooming youth, and all its attendant amusements, are regard- 



Serm. XVII.] ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. 297 



ed with envy; all of them are entered into which can be thought 
in any degree compatible with the sedateness proper to advan- 
ced age; pretexts are formed for still mingling in certain pleasures 
with decency, and without being exposed to the public ridicule. 
Lastly, in proportion as the world flies from and deserts us, it 
is pursued with more relish than ever; the long habit of it hath 
served only to render it more necessary to us, and to render us 
incapable of doing without it; and age hath never as yet been 
the cause of conversion. 

But, even admitting that this misfortune were not to be dread- 
ed, the Lord, is he not the God of all times and of all ages? Is 
there a single one of our days which belongs not to him, and 
which he hath left to us for the world and for vanity? Is he not 
even jealous of the first-fruits of our heart and of our life, figur- 
ed by those first fruits of the earth, which were commanded by 
the law to be offered up to him? Why then would you retrench 
from him the fairest portion of your years, to consecrate it to 
Satan and to his works? Is life too long to be wholly employed 
for the glory of the Lord who hath given it to us, and who pro- 
miseth to us an eternal one? Is youth too precious to be conse- 
crated towards becoming worthy of the eternal possession of the 
Supreme Being? You reserve, then, for him, only the remains 
and the dregs of your passions and life ! And it precisely is, as 
if you said to him, Lord, so long as I shall be fit for the world 
and its pleasures, think not that I shall turn towards or seek 
thee; so long as the world shall be pleased with me, I can never 
think of devoting myself to thee: afterwards, indeed, when 
it shall begin to neglect and to forsake me, then I will turn 
me towards thee; I will say to thee, c Lo, I am here! I will 
pray thee to accept a heart which the world hath rejected, and 
which reluctantly finds itself under the hard necessity of be- 
stowing itself on thee; but, till then, expect nothing from me 
but perfect indifference, and a thorough neglect : after all, thou 
art only entitled to our services when we ourselves are good for 
nothing else; we are always sure, at least, of finding thee; all 
times are the same to thee; but, after a certain season of life, 
we are unfitted for the world, and, while yet time, it is proper 
to enjoy it before it deserts us.' Soul unworthy of ever con- 
fessing the mercies of a God whom you treat with such insult ! 
And do you believe that he will then accept of a homage so 
forced, and so disgraceful to his glory, he, who taketh no delight 
but in voluntary sacrifices, he, who hath no need of man, and 
who favoureth him when he deigneth to accept even his purest 
vows and his sincerest homages? 

The prophet Isaiah formerly mocked, in these terms, those 
who worshipped vain idols: "You take," said he to them, "a 
cedar from Lebanon; you set apart the best and handsomest 
parts of it for your occasions, your pleasures, the luxury and 
ornament of your palaces; and when you know not how to em- 



298 ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. [Serm. XVII. 



ploy otherwise the remnant, you crave it into a vain idol, and 
offer up to it ridiculous vows and homages." And I in my 
turn might say to you, you set apart from your life the fairest 
and the most flourishing of your years, to indulge your fancies 
and your iniquitous passions; and when you know not to what 
purpose to devote the remainder, and it becomes useless to the 
world and to pleasures, then you make an idol of it; you make 
it serve for religion; you form to yourself of it a false, a super- 
ficial, and inanimate virtue, to which you reluctantly consecrate 
the wretched remains of your passions and of your debaucheries. 
O my God ! is this then regarding thee as a jealous God, whom 
the slightest stain in the purest offerings wounds and offends, or 
as a vain idol, which feels not the indignity and the hypocrisy 
of the homages offered up to it? 

Yes, my brethren, nothing can be reaped in an advanced age 
but what has been sown in the younger years of life. If you 
sow in corruption, said the apostle, you will cut down in cor- 
ruption : you are continually saying, yourselves, that we always 
die as we have lived; that the character and disposition change 
not; that we bear within us in old age all the defects and all 
the tendencies of our younger years; and that nothing is so for- 
tunate for us as to have formed laudable inclinations from an 
early period, and, as the prophet said, to have accustomed our- 
selves from the tender est youth to bear the yoke of the Lord. 

And, in effect, when we should attend solely to the quiet of 
our life, when we should have no other interest in view than 
that of securing peaceful and happy days to ourselves here be- 
low, what happiness to anticipate, and to stinVin their birth, by 
bending from the first towards virtue, so many violent passions 
which afterwards tear the heart, and occasion all the sorrows and 
misery of our life? What happiness to have grafted in our- 
selves only gentle and innocent ideas, to spare ourselves the 
fatal experience of so many criminal pleasures, which for ever 
corrupt the heart, defile the imagination, engender a thousand 
shameful and unruly fancies, which accompany us even in vir- 
tue, outlive our crimes, and frequently become new ones them- 
selves! What happiness to have created innocent and tranquil 
pleasures for ourselves in these younger years, to have accus- 
tomed the heart to be contented with them, not to have con- 
tracted the sad necessity of being unable to do without violent 
and criminal gratifications, and not to have rendered insupport- 
able, by a long habit of warm and tumultuous passions, the gen- 
tleness and the tranquillity of virtue and innocence ! How these 
younger years, passed in modesty and in horror at vice, attract 
blessings on the remainder of life! How attentive to all our 
ways do they render the Lord ! And how much do they render 
us the well-beloved object of his cares and of his paternal kind- 
ness ! 

But nobody denies, you will say, the happiness of being early 



Serm. XVII.] ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. 299 



devoted to God, and of having been able to resist all the temp- 
tations of youth and of pleasure. But that such is not your 
case; you have followed the common track; the torrent of the 
world and of the passions has swept all before it; you find your- 
selves, even still, under engagements too intimate and powerful 
to think of breaking them; you wait a more favourable situa- 
tion; and you promise yourselves that, when the passion which 
now enslaves you shall be extinguished, you will never again 
enter into new bonds, but will heartily range yourselves on the 
side of duty and of virtue. Second pretext; the passions and 
the engagements, from which it is impossible as yet to with- 
draw. 

But, in the first place, Are you quite certain that this more 
favourable situation which you await, in order to return to God, 
shall arrive? Who has revealed to you the course and the du- 
ration of the passions which at present restrain you? Who has 
marked limits to them, and said, like the Lord to the troubled 
waters, " Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther?" When 
shall they have an end, do you know? Can you take upon you 
to say that they shall one day be terminated? That they shall 
be ended at least before yourself? Would you be the first sin- 
ner surprised in his deplorable passions? Do not almost all 
around you die in that melancholy state? Do the ministers, 
called in to the assistance of the dying, find many sinners on 
the bed of death, who, for a length of time, have quitted their 
former habits in order to prepare themselves for that last mo- 
ment? What do we find there but souls still bound with a 
thousand chains, which death alone shall break asunder? — but 
inexplicable consciences, if I may venture to say so, and still 
enveloped in the chaos of a life wholly dissolute? What indeed 
do we expect on these occasions but unavailing regrets on that 
dreadful surprisal, and vain protestations of the different mea- 
sures they would have adopted had they been able to have fore- 
seen it? What are the usual offices of our ministry in these 
last moments? To enlighten consciences which ought then to 
need only consolation; to assist them in recalling crimes which 
we should then have only to exhort them to forget; to make 
the dying sinner sensible of his debaucheries, we who should 
then have to support and to animate him with the remembrance 
of his virtues; in a word, to open the dark concealments of his 
heart, we who should then have to open only the bosom of 
Abraham, and the treasures of an immortal glory for the soul 
on the point of disengaging itself from the body. Such are the 
melancholy offices which we shall one day perhaps have to ren- 
der to you: you, in your turn, will call upon us, and, in place 
of a soothing conversation with you on the advantages which a 
holy death promises to the believer, we shall then be solely 
employed in receiving the narration of the crimes of your life. 
But, should your passions not extend even to that last hour, 



300 ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. [Serm. XVII. 



the more you delay the deeper do you allow the roots of guilt to 
become, the more do your chains form new folds round your 
heart, the more does that leaven of corruption which you carry 
within you spread itself, ferment, and corrupt all the capacity 
of your soul. Judge of this by the progress which the passion 
has hitherto made in your heart. At first it was only timid 
liberties, and, to quiet yourself in which, you still sought some 
shadow of innocence; afterwards it was only dubious actions, 
in whieh it was still difficult to distinguish guilt from a venial 
trespass; licentiousness closely followed, but striking excesses 
were still rare; you reproached yourself in the very moment of 
their commission; you were unable to bear them long upon a con- 
science still alarmed at its state : the baekslidings are insensibly 
multiplied; licentiousness is become a fixed and habitual state; 
conscience has no longer but feebly cried out against the empire of 
the passion; guilt is become necessary to you; it has no longer 
excited remorse; you have swallowed it like water, which passes 
unfelt, and without tickling the palate by any particular flavour. 
The more you advance, the more does the venom gain; the 
weaker does any residue of strength, which modesty, reason, 
and grace had placed in you become, the more what was yet 
wholesome in your soul becomes infected and defiled. What 
folly, then, to allow wounds to become old and corrupted, under 
pretence that they will afterwards be more easily cured ! And 
what do you, in delaying, but render your evils more incurable, 
and take away from the hope of your conversion every resource 
which might still be left to you! 

You perhaps flatter yourself that there are no lasting pas- 
sions, and that, sooner or later, time and disgust shall withdraw 
you from them. 

To this I answer, 1st. That, in all probability, you shall in- 
deed become tired of the objects which at present enslave you, 
but that your passions shall not be consequently ended. You 
will doubtless form new ties, but you will not form to yourself 
a new heart. There are no eternal passions I confess, but cor- 
ruption and licentiousness are almost always so; the passions 
which are terminated solely by disgust always leave the heart 
open for the reception of some other, and it is commonly a new 
fire which expels and extinguishes the first. Call to your re- 
membrance what has hitherto happened to you: You firmly 
thought that, were such an engagement once at an end, you 
should then be free, and wholly at liberty to return to your 
God; you fixed upon that happy moment as the term for your 
penitence; that engagement has been terminated; death, incon- 
stancy, disgust, or some other accident, has broken it, and 
nevertheless you are not converted; new opportunities have 
offered, you have formed new ties, you have forgotten your for- 
mer resolutions, and your last state is become worse than the 



Serm. XVII.] ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. 301 



first. The passions which are not extinguished by grace serve 
merely to light up and to prepare the heart for new ones. 

I answer, 2dly, When all your criminal engagements should 
even be ended, and that no particular object should interest 
your heart; if time and disgust alone hare effected this, yet will 
not your conversion be more advanced. You will still hold to 
all, in no longer holding to any thing; you will find yourself in 
a certain vague state of indolence and of insensibility, more re- 
moved from the kingdom of God than even the ardour of mad 
passions: your heart, free from any particular passion, will be 
as if filled with a universal passion; if I may speak in this man- 
ner, with an immense void which will wholly occupy it. It will 
even be so much the more difficult for you to quit this state, as 
you will have nothing sufficiently striking to catch at. You 
will find yourself without vigour, taste, or inclination for sal- 
vation: it is a calm from which you will find it more difficult 
to extricate yourself than even from the tempest, for the same 
winds which cause the storm may sometimes drive us fortu- 
nately into port; but the greater the calm is, the more cer- 
tainly it leads to destruction. 

But, lastly, You say we would willingly change and adopt 
a more reasonable and more Christian life; we feel the utter 
emptiness of the world and of all its pleasures; we enter into 
amusements, and into a certain dissipation, without relish, and 
as if with regret; we would wish to renounce them, and se- 
riously to labour towards our salvation; but this first step 
startles us; it is a matter of notoriety which engages us towards 
the public, and which we have many doubts of being able to 
support; we are of a rank which renders the smallest change 
conspicuous; and we are afraid lest, like so many others, we act 
a part that will not be lasting, and consequently will leave us 
only the ridicule without the merit of devotion. 

You dread, my dear hearer, the being able to go through, with 
it. What ! in delaying your conversion, you promise yourself 
that God shall one day touch you; and, in being converted at 
present, you dare not promise yourself that he will sustain you? 
You depend upon his mercies while insulting him, and you dare 
not trust to them when glorifying him? You believe that you 
have nothing to risk, on his part, in continuing to offend him, 
and you have no confidence in him when beginning to serve 
him? O man! where is here that reason and that rectitude 
of judgment which thou vauntest so much? And must it be, 
that in the business of thy salvation alone thou art a sink of 
contradiction and an incomprehensible paradox? 

Besides, might we not with reason say to you, make a be- 
ginning at least; try if, in effect, you shall be unable to sus- 
tain yourself in the service of God? Is it not worth the trouble 
of being tried? Does a man, precipitated by the tempest into 
the sea, and who finds himself on the point of drowning, not 



302 ON THE DELAY OF CONVERSION. [Seiim. XVII. 



strain every nerve, in the first place, to gain the shore by swim- 
ming, before he resigns himself to the mercy of the waves? 
Would he say to himself, as an excuse for making no effort to 
save himself, " I shall perhaps be unable to go through with it; 
my strength will most likely fail me by the way?" Ah! he 
tries, he makes every effort, he struggles against the danger, he 
labours to the last moment of his strength, and only gives way 
at last when, overpowered by the violence of the waves, he 
is forced to yield to the evil of his destiny. You perish, my 
dear hearer, the waves gain upon you, the torrent sweeps you 
away, and you hesitate whether you shall try to extricate your- 
self from the danger; and you waste, in calculating your 
strength, the only moments left to provide for your safety? 
And you sacrifice, in deliberating the little time that is left to 
you for the sole purpose of disengaging yourself from the peril 
which is imminent, and in which so many others are continu- 
ally perishing before your eyes. 

But, lastly, even granting that in the end the various hard- 
ships of virtue tire out your weakness, and that you find your- 
self under the necessity of retreating; at any rate, you will al- 
ways have passed some little time without offending your God; 
you will always have made some efforts towards appeasing him; 
you will always have devoted some days to the praise of his 
holy name; at any rate, it will be a portion cut off from your 
criminal life, and from that treasure of iniquity which you amass 
for the terrible day of vengeance; you will have acquired, at 
least, the right of representing your weakness to God, and of 
saying to him, " Lord, thou beholdest my desires and my weak- 
ness; why, O my God! have I not a heart more constant to 
thee, more determined in the cause of truth, more callous to the 
world, and more difficult to be led astray? Put an end, O Lord, 
to mine uncertainties and to mine inconstancy; take from the 
world that dominion which it hath over my heart; resume thine 
ancient rights over it, and no longer imperfectly attract me, 
lest I again fly off from thee. I am covered with shame at the 
eternal variations of my life, and they make me that I am afraid 
to raise up mine eyes to thee, or to promise a constant fidelity. 
I have so often broken my promises after swearing to thee an 
eternal love; my weakness hath so often led me to forget the 
happiness of that engagement, that I have no longer the courage 
to answer for myself. My heart betrays me every instant; and 
a thousand times, on rising from thy feet, and with mine eyes 
still bathed in tears of sorrow for having offended thee, an op- 
portunity hath seduced me; and the very same infidelities, of 
which I had so lately expressed mine abhorrence, have found 
me, as formerly, weak and unfaithful: with a heart so light and 
so uncertain, what assurance, O my God! can I give to thee? 
And what, indeed, could I presume to promise to myself? I 
have so often thought that my resolutions would now at last be 



Serm. XVIIL] ON FALSE TRUST. 



303 



constant; I have found myself in moments so lively and so affect- 
ing of grace and of compunction, and which seemed for ever to 
fix the durability of my fidelity, that I see nothing now which 
can either be capable of fixing me, or of affording me a hope 
of that stability in virtue which I have hitherto been unable to 
attain. Let the danger of my situation touch thee, O my God! 
the character of my heart discourages and alarms me ; I know 
that inconstancy in thy way is a presage of perdition, and that 
the versatile and changeable soul is cursed in thy holy books. 
But, while yet sensible of the holy inspirations of thy grace, I 
will once more endeavour to enter into thy ways; and, if I 
must perish, I prefer being lost while exerting myself to return 
to thee, O my God! who permittest not the soul who sincerely 
seeketh thee to perish, and who art the only Lord worthy of 
being served, to the shocking tranquillity of an avowed and de- 
termined rebellion, and to the melancholy idea of renouncing all 
hopes of those eternal riches which thou preparest for those who 
shall have loved and served thee." 



SERMON XVIIL 
ON FALSE TRUST. 

Luke xxiv. 21. 

But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed 
Israel. 

In vain had Jesus Christ, during his mortal life, a thousand 
times declared to his disciples, that it was flattering themselves 
to count upon a reward which had not been merited by crosses 
and toils: this truth, so little agreeable to nature, had never 
been willingly received; and all the times that the Saviour had 
tried to undeceive them on the opposite error, they heard not 
that word of the gospel, and it was not seen by them. Such is 
still at present the disposition of the two disciples to whom Jesus 
Christ condescends to appear in their way to Emmaus; they 
expected that their master should deliver Israel from the yoke 
of nations, and shoidd cause them to be seated on twelve earthly 
thrones, without any exertion being necessary on their part in 
order to mount them, without the Saviour himself having oc- 
casion to suffer in order to triumph over his enemies. 



SOI 



ON FALSE TRUST. [Seem. XVIII. 



Besides the mistake wliicli led them to consider Jesus Christ 
as a temporal deliverer. I likewise observe another, which ap- 
pears to me not less dangerous in them, but which at present is 
more common among us : it is that false trust by which they are 
persuaded, that, without co-operating towards it themselves, and 
in leaving to Jesus Christ the whole management of their de- 
liverance, they shall receive the fulfilment of the magnificent 
promises, which, in his conversations with them upon the earth, 
he had so often reiterated. Now, my brethren, this false trust, 
which makes all to be expected by sinners from grace alone, 
without any co-operation on their part, and the reward of the 
holy to be hoped, although they labour not towards meriting it; 
this false trust, which always reckons upon the goodness of God 
whom it offends, which, without combating, promises itself to 
be crowned, and which always hopes against probability; this 
false trust, which is unwilling to purchase heaven, and yet ex- 
pects it, is the most universal and most established error among 
Christians; and when Jesus Christ shall once more appear up- 
on the earth, he will find many of his unbelieving disciples, who 
shall have occasion to say to him, " we trusted." 

This my bretlrren, is what induces me to occupy your time 
at present upon so important a matter, persuaded that a false 
trust is the source of condemnation to almost all sinners: that 
those who are afraid of perishing, never perish; and that I 
could not better fulfil my ministry*, than by establishing in your 
hearts those salutary feelings of mistrust which lead to precau- 
tions and to remedies, and which, in disturbing the peace of sin, 
leave, in its place, the peace of Jesus Christ, which surpasseth 
all feeling. Thus, in order to give a proper extension to so use- 
ful a subject, I reduce it to two propositions: there is no disposi- 
tion more foolish than that of the sinner who presumes, with- 
out labouring towards his amendments is the first: there is none 
more injurious to God, is the second. The folly of a false trust: 
the insult of a false trust. Let us explain these two truths. 

Part L I am not afraid of openly agreeing with you. my 
brethren, that the mercies of the Lord are always more abund- 
ant than our wickednesses, and that his goodness may furnish 
legitimate motives of trust to all sinners. The doctrine which 
I go to establish is sufficiently terrible, without adding to it new 
terrors by concealing part of those truths which may tend to 
soften it; and if caution be required in this matter, it is rather 
in not bringing forward all that rnisiit alarm the conscience, than 
in concealing what might tend to console it. 

It is true, that every where the holy books give us magnifi- 
cent and soothing ideas of the goodness of God. One while he 
is a mild and long-forbearing master, who awaits the penitence 
of the sinner : who covers the sins of men, in order to lead 
them to repentance: who is silent and quiet; who is slow to 



Serm. XVIIL] ON FALSE TRUST. 



305 



punish, and delays in order that he may be prevented; who 
threatens in order to be disarmed: another while he is a tender 
friend, who is never weary of knocking at the gate of the 
heart; who flatters, entreats, and solicits us; and who, in order 
to draw us to himself, employs every thing which an ingenious 
love can invent, to recal a rebellious heart: Again, and lastly, 
for all would never be said, he is an indefatigable Shepherd, who 
goes, even through the wildest mountains, in search of his 
strayed sheep; and, having at last found it, places it upon his 
shoulders, and is so transported with joy that even the celestial 
harmony are ordained to celebrate its happy return. It must 
surely be confessed, that the consolation of these images can re- 
ceive no addition; and every sinner who, after this, despairs, 
or even gives way to despondency, is the most foolish of all men. 
But do not from thence conclude, that the sinner who presumes 
is less foolish, or that the mercy of the Lord can be a legitimate 
foundation of trust to those who are continually desiring their 
conversion, and yet, without labouring towards that great work, 
promise every thing to themselves from a goodness which their 
very confidence insults. To convince you of this, before I en- 
ter into the main points of my subject, remark, I beg of you, 
that, among that innumerable crowd of sinners, of every des- 
cription, with which the world is filled, there is not one who 
hath not hopes of his conversion; not one who, before hand 
considers himself as a child of wrath, and doomed to perish; 
not one who doth not flatter himself that at last the Lord shall 
one day have pity upon him: the lewd, the ambitious, the world- 
ly, the revengeful, the unjust, all hope, yet no one repents. Now, 
I mean, at present, to prove to you, that this disposition of 
false trust is, of all others in which the creature can be, the 
most foolish: follow, I beg of you, my reasons; they appear 
worthy of your attention. 

In effect, when, in order to make the folly of false trust ap- 
parent, I should have only the uncertainty in which a sinner, 
who hath lost the sanctifying grace, is of his salvation, no other 
argument would be required to justify my first proposition. And, 
when I speak of the uncertainty of his salvation, you easily com- 
prehend that there is no question here of that uncertainty com- 
mon to all believers, which occasions that no one can know 
whether he be worthy of love or of hatred; whether he shall 
persevere to the end, or fall never more to recover himself: ter- 
rible subject of dread, even for the most righteous ! I speak of 
a more shocking uncertainty, since it does not suppose, in the 
sinner in question, a doubtful state of righteousness and Chris- 
tian fears, upon backslidings to come ! but because it is found- 
ed upon a certain state of sin, and upon a repentance which nobody 
can guarantee to him. 

Now, I say, that it is the height of folly to presume in this 
state. For confess it, my dear hearer; inveterate sinner as you 

u 



306 



ON FALSE TRUST. [Serm. XVIII. 



are; abiding, as you tranquilly do, in iniquitous passions, in the 
midst even of all the solemnities of religion, and of all the ter- 
rors of the holy word, upon the foolish hope of one day, at last, 
quitting this deplorable state; you cannot deny that it is at 
least doubtful whether you shall retrieve yourself, or, even to 
the end, remain in your sin. I even admit you to be full of good 
desires; but you are not ignorant that desires convert nobody, 
and that the greatest sinners are often those who most long for 
their conversion. Now, the doubt here only equal, woidd you 
be prudent in remaining careless? What? In the frightful un- 
certainty whether you shall die in your irregularity, or if God 
shall withdraw you from it; floating, as I may say? betwixt 
heaven and hell; on the poise betwixt these two destinies, you 
could be indifferent on the decision? Hope is the sweetest and 
the most nattering choice; and for that reason you would incline 
to its side? Ah! my dear hearer, were there no other reason to 
be afraid than that of hoping, you would not be prudent to live 
in this profound calm. 

But such is not even your case; things are far indeed from 
being equal; in this shocking doubt which every sinner may 
inwardly form: " Shall I expire in mine iniquity, in the sin in 
which I actually and have so long lived; or shall I not die in 
it?" The first part is infinitely the most probable. For, 1st, 
your own powers are not sufficient to regain that sanctity you 
have lost; a foreign, super natural, and heavenly aid is necessary, 
of which nobody can assure you; in place of wliich, you 
need only yourself to remain in your sin: there is nothing in 
your nature which can resuscitate the grace lost, no seed of sal- 
vation, no principle of spiritual life; and you bear in your heart 
a fatal source of corruption which may every day produce fresh 
fruits of death : it is more likely, therefore, that you shall die 
in your guilt than it is, that you shall be converted. 2dly, Not 
only is a foreign and divine aid necessary, but also an aid uncom- 
mon, rare, denied to almost all sinners; in short, a miracle for 
your conversion; for the conversion of the sinner is one of 
the greatest prodigies of grace, and you know yourself that such 
instances are extremely rare in the world: Now and then some 
fortunate soul whom God withdraweth from licentiousness. But 
these are remarkable exertions of the divine mercy, and not in 
the common track: in place of which, you have only to let things 
pursue their natural course, and you shall die such as you are: 
God hath only to follow his ordinary laws, and your destruction 
is certain; the possibility of your salvation is founded solely on 
a singular effort of hi§ power and mercy; the certitude of your 
condemnation is founded upon the commonest of all rules: in 
sl word, that you perish, is the ordinary lot of sinners- who re- 
semble you; that you are converted, is a singularity of which 
there are few examples. 3dly, In order to continue in your 
present state, you have only to follow your inclinations, to yield 



Serm. XVIIL] ON FALSE TRUST. 



307 



yourself up to yourself, and quietly to allow yourself to be car- 
ried down by the stream; to do this you have occasion for 
neither effort nor violence : But to return, ah ! you must break 
through inclinations fortified by time; you must hate and resist 
yourself, tear yourself from the dearest objects, break asunder 
the tenderest ties, make the most heroical efforts, you who are 
incapable of the commonest ones. Now, I demand, if, in a 
matter to come, or in uncertain events, we ever augur in favour 
of those who have most obstacles to surmount, and most difficul- 
ties to struggle against? Doth not the most easy always appear 
the most probable? Soften as much as you please this truth in 
your mind; view it in the most favourable lights; this proposi- 
tion on your eternal destiny is the most incontestible of the Chris- 
tian morality. It is beyond comparison more certain that I 
shall never be converted, and that I shall die in my sin, than 
that the Lord shall have pity upon me, and at last withdraw 
me from it: this is your situation; and, if you can still be in- 
different, and flatter yourself in such a state, your security, my 
dear hearer, terrifies me. 

But I go farther, and I entreat you to listen to me. The 
sinner who, without labouring to reclaim himself, assures him- 
self of conversion, presumes not only in a fearful uncertainty, 
and where every thing seems to conclude against him, but also 
in spite of the moral certainty, as we are taught by faith, that 
he is lost. Here are my proofs, 1st, You expect that God shall 
convert you; but how do you expect it? By continually placing 
new obstacles in the way of his grace; by riveting your chains; 
by aggravating your yoke; by multiplying your crimes; by ne- 
glecting every opportunity of salvation, which his solemnities, 
his mysteries, and even the terrors of his word offer to you; by 
always remaining in the same dangers; by changing nothing 
in your manners, your pleasures, your intimacies; in short, in 
every thing whieh continues to nourish, in your heart, that fatal 
passion from which you hope that grace shall deliver you. How ! 
the foolish virgins are rejected, solely for having negligently and 
without fervour awaited the bridegroom; and you, faithless 
soul, who await him while completing the measure of your crimes, 
you dare to flatter yourself that you shall be more favourably 
treated? 

2dly, Grace is accorded only to tears, to solicitations, to eager 
desires; it requires to be long courted. Now, do you pray? 
At least, do you entreat? Do you imitate the importunity of 
the widow of the gospel? Do you labour, like Cornelius the 
Gentile, to attract that grace by charities and other Christian 
works? Do you say to the Lord, every day, with the prophet, 
" Hide not thy face from me, O Lord, lest I be like unto them 
that go down into the pit?" Ah! you say to him, " Lord, thou 
wilt draw me to thyself; in vain I resist thee; thou wilt, at 
last, break asunder my chains; however great be the corruption 



308 



ON FALSE TRUST. [Serm. XVIIL 



of my heart, thou wilt ultimately change it." Fool ! what more 
likely to repel a gift than the temerity which exacts it, and even 
in the very moment when most unworthy dares to claim it as a 
right! Fresh argument against you; grace is reserved for the 
lowly and the fearful, who dread being refused what is not ow- 
ing to them: it is upon these souls that the Spirit of God re- 
lieth, and taketh delight in his working wonders; on the con- 
trary, " he despiseth the presumptuous sinner, and knoweth him 
afar off." 

3dly, The grace of conversion which you so confidently ex- 
pect, is, as you know, the greatest of all gifts. Nevertheless, as 
you know still better, there is scarcely a sinner more unworthy 
of it than yourself; unworthy through the nature of your dis- 
orders, of which you alone know the infamy and the enormity; 
unworthy through the lights and inspirations you have a thou- 
sand times misused; unworthy through the favours of the mys- 
teries and of the truths which you have always neglected; un- 
worthy through the sequel, even of your natural inclinations, 
which heaven, at your birth, had formed so happy and so trac- 
table to truth, and which you have turned into melancholy 
means of vice; unworthy through the iniquitous derisions which 
you have made of piety, and those impious desires, so injurious 
to the truth of God, which have a thousand times led you to 
wish that all we say of a future state were a fable; lastly, un- 
worthy through that profound security in which you live, which, 
before God, is the worst of all your crimes. Now, I ask no- 
thing here but equity; if only a single sinner were to be ex- 
cluded from that grace of conversion which you expect, you 
would have every reason to dread that the exclusion fell upon 
you, and that you were to be that single child of curse, separated 
as an anathematized from all his brethren. But, if almost all 
be deprived of that blessing, ah! my dear hearer, ought you to 
reckon upon it as secure? And what have you but a superabun- 
dance of sins to distinguish you from others? If the hope of 
the presumptuous sinner perish in general with himself, can you 
suppose that your salvation shall be accomplished by the same 
way in which all others perish? I know that we ought never to 
despair; but humble confidence is very different from presump- 
tion: humble confidence, after having tried all, counts upon 
nothing, and you depend upon all without having ever tried any 
thing. Humble trust considers the mercy of the Lord only as 
the supplement of the defects of penitence, and you make it 
the refuge of your crimes; humble trust, with fear and tremb- 
ling, awaits the pardon of those faults it hath lamented, and you 
coolly expect that those shall be forgiven of which you never 
mean to repent. I know, and I again repeat, that we ought 
never to despair; but were it possible that despair could be legi- 
timate, ah ! it would be when hope is presumptuously encou- 
raged. 



Serm. XVIIL] ON FALSE TRUST. 



309 



But age will mellow the passions, says inwardly the sinner 
here; enticing opportunities will not always come in the way; 
circumstances more favourable for salvation will occur; and 
what is at present impossible, shall one day perhaps be done when 
a thousand actual impediments shall be removed. My God! 
in this manner doth the unfortunate soul deceive himself; and it 
is through an illusion so palpable that the demon seduces al- 
most all men, the wisest as the most foolish, the most enlight- 
ened as the most credulous, the great as the common people. 
For say, my dear hearer, when you promise yourself that one 
day the Lord at last shall have pity upon you, you no doubt 
promise yourself that he will change your heart; now, why do 
you depend upon this change, so necessary to your salvation, 
more in future than at present? In the first place, shall your 
dispositions for penitence be then more favourable? Shall your 
heart find it easier to break asunder its chains? What! in- 
clinations deeply rooted through time and years shall be more 
easily torn out? A torrent which has already hallowed out its 
bed, shall be more easy to turn aside? Are you in your senses 
when you say so? Ah! even now it appears so difficult to re- 
press your inordinate passions, though yet in their infancy, and 
consequently more tractable and easy to regulate ! You delay 
your conversion only because it would cost you too much to 
conquer yourself, on certain points: How! you are persuaded 
that it will cost you less in the end; that this fatal plant, then 
become a tree, shall be more pliable; that this wound, inveterate 
and of longer standing, shall be more easy to cure, and shall 
require less grievous remedies? you expect resources and facili- 
ties towards penitence from time; it is time, my brethren, which 
will deprive you of all those yet remaining. 

2dly, Shall grace be either more frequent in future, or more 
victorious? But, granting it even to be so, your cupidity, then 
more powerful, opposing greater impediments, the grace which 
would now triumph over your heart, and change you into a tho- 
rough penitent, will no longer then but slightly agitate you, and 
excite within you only weak and unavailing desires of penitence. 
But you have little reason to flatter yourself even with this 
hope: the more you irritate the goodness of God by delaying 
your conversion, the more will he withdraw himself from you: 
every moment diminishes in some measure his favours and his 
kindness. Recollect, that when you first began to deviate from 
his ways, not a day passed without his operating within you 
some movement of salvation, troubles, remorses, and desires of 
penitence. At present, if you attend to it, these inspirations 
are more rare: it is only on certain occasions that your con- 
science is aroused; you are partly familiarized with your dis- 
orders. Ah ! my dear hearer, you easily see that your insen- 
sibility will be only increased in the sequel: God will more and 
more retire from you, and will deliver you up to a reprobate 



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ON FALSE TRUST. [Serm. XVIII. 



feeling, and to that fatal tranquillity which is the consummation 
and the most dreadful punishment of iniquity. Now I ask, are 
you not ahsurd in thus marking out, for your conversion, a 
time in which you shall never have had fewer aids on the part 
of grace, and less facility on the part of your heart? 

I might still add, that the more you delay the more you ac- 
cumulate debts; the more you enrich the treasures of iniqui- 
ty, the more crimes you shall have to expiate, the more ri- 
gorous shall your reparation have to be, and consequently the 
more shall your penitence be difficult. Slight austerities, some 
retrenchments, some Christian charities, would perhaps suffice 
at present to acquit you before your Judge, and to appease 
his justice. But, in the sequel, when the abundance of your 
crimes shall have risen above your head, and time and years 
shall have blunted, if not totally destroyed, in your memory, 
the multitude and the flagrancy of your iniquities; ah! no 
reparation on your part shall then be sufficiently rigorous, no 
mortification sufficiently austere, no humiliation sufficiently pro- 
found, no pleasure, however innocent, which you must not deny 
yourself, no indulgence which will not be criminal: holy excesses 
of penitence will be necessary to compensate the duration and 
the enormity of your crimes; it will require you to quit all, to 
tear yourself from every thing, to sacrifice your fortune, inte- 
terests, and conveniency, perhaps to condemn yourself to a per- 
petual retreat, for it is only through these means that the great 
shiners are recalled. Now, if slight rigours, which would at 
present be sufficient amends, appeal* so insupportable, and dis- 
gust you at the idea of a change, shall penitence be more allu- 
ring, when more toils, and steps a thousand times more bitter, 
present themselves in its train? My God! upon the affair of 
salvation alone it is that men are capable of such wilful mis- 
takes. Ah! my brethren, of what avail are great lights, extent 
of genius, deep penetration, and solid judgment in the ma- 
nagement of earthly matters, and of vain undertakings which 
shall perish with us, if we are children in the grand work of 
eternity? 

And allow me to conclude this part of my discourse with a 
final reason, which, I trust, will serve to convince you. \ ou 
consider the vain hope of a conversion as a feeling of grace and 
salvation, and as a proof that the Lord visiteth you, and that 
he hath not yet delivered you up to all the inveteracy of sin. 
But, my dear hearer, the Lord cannot visit you in his mercy 
without inspiring you with salutary troubles and fears on the 
state of your conscience; all the operations of grace begin with 
these; consequently, while you continue tranquil, it is evident 
that God treateth you according to all the rigour of his justice, 
and that he exerciseth upon you the most terrible of his chas- 
tisements; I mean to say, his neglect and the denial of his grace. 
Peace in sin, the security in which you live, is therefore the 
most infallible mark that God is no longer with you, and that 



Serm. XVIIL] ON FALSE TRUST. 



311 



his grace, which in the criminal soul always works trouble and 
anxiety, dread and distrust, is totally extinguished in yours. 
Thus you comfort yourself on what ought to excite your justest 
fears: the most deplorable signs of your reprobation form in 
your mind the most solid foundation of yom' hope : trust in sin 
is the most terrible chastisement with which God can punish 
the sinner, and you draw from it a prejudication of salvation 
and of penitence. Tremble, if any remains of faith be yet left 
you: this calm is the forerunner of a shipwreck; you are stamped 
with the mark of the reprobate ; reckon not upon a mercy which 
treats you so much the more rigorously, as it permits you to 
hope and to depend upon it. 

The error of the majority of sinners is that of imagining that 
the grace of conversion is one of those sudden miracles by which 
the whole face of things is changed in the twinkling of an eye; 
which plants, tears up, destroys, rears up at the first stroke, and 
in an instant creates the new man, as the earthly man was former- 
ly drawn from nothing. The grossest of all mistakes, my dear 
hearer; conversion is in general a slow and tardy miracle, the 
fruit of cares, of troubles, of fears and of bitter anxieties. 

The days, saith Jesus Christ, which are to precede the utter 
destruction of this visible world and the coming of the Son of 
Man, shall be days of trouble and wo; nations shall rise against 
nations, and kings against kings; horrible signs shall be seen in 
the firmament long before the King of Glory himself shall appear; 
all nature shall announce, by its disorder, the approaching de- 
struction and the coming of its God. Ah! my dear hearer, 
behold the image of the change of your heart, of the destruction 
of that world of passions within you, of the coming of the Son 
of Man into your soul. Long before that great event, internal 
wars shall take place; you shall feel your passions excited one 
against the other; blessed signs of salvation shall appear upon 
your person; all shall be shaken, all shall be disturbed; all 
within you shall announce the destruction of the carnal man, 
the coming of the Son of God, the end of your iniquities, the 
renovation of your soul, a new heaven and a new earth. Ah ! 
when these blessed things shall come to pass, then lift up your 
head, and say that your redemption draweth nigh; then be con- 
fident, and adore the awful but consolatory preparations of a 
God who is on the eve of entering into your heart. But, while 
nothing is shaken within you, and no change appears in your 
soul; while your heart faileth not for fear, and your passions, 
still tranquil, remain undisturbed but by the obstacles which 
retard their gratification; ah! mistrust those who shall tell you 
that the Lord draweth nigh; that you will immediately find 
him in the sanctuary, I mean to say, in the participation of the 
sacrament, in those retired places to which you shall perhaps go 
to comfort him in the person of his afflicted members; who will 
be continually saying, " Lo, here is Christ;" believe them not; 



312 



ON FALSE TRUST. [Serm. XVIIL 



they are false prophets, saith Jesus Christ; no sign of his com- 
ing hath taken place within you: in vain you expect and pre- 
sume; it is not in this manner that he will come; trouble and 
dread walk before him; and the soul who continues tranquil, 
and yet trusts, shall never be visited by him. 

w Happy, therefore, is the man that fear eth al way:" he whose 
virtues do not entirely quiet him upon his eternal destiny, who 
trembles lest the imperfections mingled with his most laudable 
works not only destroy their whole merit before God, but even 
rank them among those which God shall punish on the day of 
his wrath. But what idea will some one say to me, do you 
give us of the God we worship ! An idea worthy of him, my 
brethren; and, in my second part, I shall prove to you, that 
false trust is injurious to him, and forms to itself the idea of a 
God, who is neither true, wise, just, nor even merciful. 

Part II. It is rather surprising, my brethren, that false trust 
should pretend to find even in religion motives which authorise 
it, and should mistake the most criminal of all dispositions, for 
a sentiment of salvation, and a fruit of faith and of grace. In 
effect, the sinner, who, without wishing to quit his irregularities, 
promises himself a change, alleges, ^ justification of his presump- 
tion, 1st, The power of God, who ruleth over the hearts of men 
who can change in an instant the will, and to whom it is equally 
easy to produce the child of promise from the sterility of old 
age, as from the fecundity of youth; 2dly, his justice for hav- 
ing formed man of clay, that is to say, weak, and with almost un- 
conquerable tendencies to pleasure, he ought to have some con- 
sideration for his weakness, and more readily pardon faults which 
are, as it were, unavoidable to him; lastly, his mercy, always 
ready to receive the repentant sinner. Now, my brethren, it is 
easy to take from false trust pretexts so unworthy of piety, and 
show that the disposition of the presuming sinner insults God 
in all the above-mentioned perfections. Allow me to explain 
my reasons, and continue to honour me with your attention. 

In the first place, when you conceive a powerful God, master 
of hearts, and changing at his pleasure the rebellious wills of 
men, is it not true, that you at the same time conceive a power 
regulated by wisdom, that is to say, which doth nothing but in 
conformity with that order it hath established? Now, the pre- 
sumptuous sinner attributes to God a blind power, which acts 
indiscriminately. For, though he can whatever he willeth, never- 
theless, as he is infinitely wise, there is an order in his wills; 
he willeth not at random, and whatever he doth hath its eternal 
reasons in the depth of his divine wisdom. Now, it is evident 
that this divine wisdom would not be sufficiently justified be- 
fore men, if the grace of conversion were to be at last accorded 
to false trust. For say, in order to merit the greatest of all fa- 
vours, it would then be sufficient to have a thousand times 



Serm. XVIII. ] 



ON FALSE TRUST. 



313 



rejected it? The righteous man, who continually crucifies his 
flesh, who incessantly groans in order to obtain the precious 
gift of perseverance, would then have no better claim than the 
sinner, who, without having ever placed himself in a situation 
to merit it, hath always promised it to himself? It would then 
be perfectly indifferent either to serve the Lord, and to walk 
uprightly before him, or to pursue the erroneous ways of the 
passions, since at the end, the lot of each would be the same ! 
Much more, it would then be a misfortune, a folly, a lost 
trouble, to have carried the yoke from youth, since nothing 
would be risked by delaying it? The maxims of debauchery, 
on the love of pleasures in the early stage of life, and on defer- 
ring repentance to the years of decrepitude and debility, would 
then be the rules of wisdom and of religion? The wonders of 
grace would then serve but to tempt the fidelity of the just, but 
to authorise the impenitence of sinners, but to destroy the fruit 
of the sacrament, and to augment the ills of the church? Is this 
the God whom we worship? And would he be so wonderful in 
his gifts, according to the expression of the prophet, if he were 
to dispense them with so little either of order or of wisdom? 

In effect, if the empire which God hath over hearts could 
serve as a resource for a presumptuous sinner, upon that footing 
the conversion of all men would be certain, even of those infi- 
dels who know not the Lord, of those barbarous nations who 
have never heard his name. Doth God not rule over the hearts 
of all men? Who hath ever withstood his will? Is he not able 
to make his light shine through the profoundest darkness, to 
change into lambs the fiercest lions, and to turn his enemies 
into the most intrepid confessors of his name? Is the heart of 
an Indian, or of a savage, a more arduous conquest to him than 
that of a presumptuous sinner? Is not every thino; alike easy to 
him? He hath only to say, and it is done. Yet, nevertheless, 
would you thereupon be willing that your eternal destiny should 
run the same hazard as that of a savage, who, in the heart of his 
forests, almost inaccessible to the preaching of the gospel, wor- 
ships absurd and monstrous divinities? God may raise up, in 
his favour, evangelical ministers, who, along with the lights of 
faith, shall bring grace and salvation to his soul. You say that 
it requires one of those miraculous efforts of the almighty power 
to overcome all the difficulties which apparently render the con- 
version of that imfortunate creature impossible : on the contrary, 
that you surrounded with the aids of the sacrament, with the 
light of the doctrine and of instruction, are surely iu a situation 
much more likely to secure your salvation, and consequently, 
that you have infinitely more ground to promise it to yourself. 
Ah ! my dear hearer, you deceive yourself, and I assure you, 
that, to me, the salvation, of that infidel appears less hopeless 
than yours. He has never abused favours which he has never 
received; and hitherto you have im worthily rejected all those 



314 



ON FALSE TRUST. [Serm. XVIII. 



which have been offered to you; he has never resisted that 
truth which he has never known, and you iniquitously with- 
stand it: the first impulse of grace will triumph over his heart, 
and the strongest impressions are ineffectual against the inflexi- 
bility of yours: a, single ray of light will disclose to him errors 
and truths till then unknown, and all the lights of faith are un- 
able to disturb the tranquillity of your passions: he holds out 
to the mercy of God only the misfortune of his birth, only sins 
almost involuntary, only wretchedness rather than crimes, all 
of them proper motives to affect him, and you hold out to him 
affected acts of ingratitude, and vile perseverances in obstinacy, 
all subjects calculated to remove him for ever from you. Ah ! 
it is easy for the Lord to bear upon the wings across the seas 
apostolical men; his angels, when he pleaseth, know to trans- 
port his prophets from the land in which he is worshipped, even 
into Babylon, in order to visit a just man exposed to the fury 
of lions; but if any thing were difficult to him, it would be that 
of conquering a rebellious heart, of recalling a soul born in the 
kingdom of light, surrounded with all the succours of faith, pe- 
netrated with all the feelings of grace, aided by all the examples 
of piety, and, nevertheless, always firm in its errors. It is an 
illusion, therefore, in his power to search for vain motives of 
security; God could operate so many other prodigies in favour 
of a thousand sinners whom he forsaketh, although they be not 
so unworthy as you of his grace: it is a dangerous maxim to 
regulate his will upon his power. 

The second error which authorises false trust, has its founda- 
tion in the unjust idea formed of the divine justice. They per- 
suade themselves that, man being born with violent inclinations 
for pleasure, our errors are more worthy of the pity than of the 
anger of the Lord; and that our weakness alone solicits his 
favour, in place of arming his indignation against us. 

But, in the first place, it might be said to you, that the cor- 
ruption of your nature comes not from the Creator; that it is 
the work of man, and the punishment of his sin; that the Lord 
had created man righteous; and consequently, that this unfor- 
tunate tendency, of which you complain, is an irregularity which 
God must punish whenever you fall under it ; how then can 
you suppose that it shall serve you as an excuse? It is in con- 
sequence of it that you are a child of wrath and an outcast ves- 
sel: how do you pretend to draw reasons from thence, in order 
to enter into contestation even with God, and to challenge his 
justice? It is, in a word, in consequence of it that you are un- 
worthy of all favours; how dare you to hold it out as a reason 
for demanding them? 

2dly, It might be said to you, that, whatever be the weak- 
ness of our will, man is always master of his desires; that he 
hath been left under the charge of his own resolution; that his 
passions have no more empire over him than what he himself 



Serm. XVIII. j ON FALSE TRUST. 



315 



chooses to allow them; and that water, as well as fire, hath 
been placed in our way, in order to allow a perfect freedom of 
choice to our own will. All! I could herein attest your own 
conscience, and demand of you, above all, of you my dear hearer, 
if, in spite of your weakness, whenever you have forsaken the 
law of God, you have not felt that it wholly depended upon 
yourself to have continued faithful; if piercing lights have not 
discovered to you all the horror of your transgression; if secret 
remorses have not turned you away from it; if you have not 
then hesitated betwixt pleasure and duty; if, after a thousand 
internal deliberations, and those secret vicissitudes, where one 
while grace, and the other while cupidity gained the victory, 
you have not at last declared for guilt, as if still trembling, and 
almost unable to harden yourself against yourself ? I might go 
even further, and demand of you, if, considering the happy in- 
clinations of modesty and of reserve, the dispositions with 
which God had favoured you at your birth, the innocency of 
virtue would not have been more natural, more pleasing, and 
more easy to you than the licentiousness of vice; demand of 
you, if you have not suffered more by being unfaithful to your 
God, than it would have cost you to have been righteous ; if you 
have not been obliged to encroach more upon yourself, to do 
more violence to your heart, to bear with more vexations, to 
force your way through more intricate and more arduous paths ! 
Ah ! what then can the justice of God find in your dissipations 
which doth not furnish to him fresh matter of severity and anger 
against you? 

Lastly, It might be added, that, if you are born weak, yet the 
goodness of God hath environed your soul with a thousand aids; 
that it is that well-beloved vine which he hath fostered with the 
tenderest care, which he hath fenced with a deep moat, and for- 
tified with an inaccessible tower: I mean to say, that your soul 
hath been as if defended from its birth by the succours of the 
sacrament, by the lights of the doctrine, by the force of exam- 
ples, by continual inspirations of grace, and perhaps by the 
special aids likewise of a holy and a Christian education pro- 
vided for you by the Lord, and which so many others have 
wanted. Ingrate ! wherein could you be able to justify your 
weakness before the Lord, and to interest his justice itself to 
use indulgence towards you? Ah! what do your transgressions 
present to him but the abuses of his grace, and means of salva- 
tion perverted, through the licentiousness of your will, into oc- 
casions of sin? 

But let us leave all these reasons, and tell me : that weakness 
of which you complain, and for which you pretend that God 
will have consideration, is it not your own handwork, and the 
fruit of your own special irregularities? Recollect, here, those 
happy days when your innocence had not yet been wrecked; 
were your passions then so difficult to be overcome? Did mo- 
desty, temperance, fidelity, piety, then appear to you as imprac- 



316 



ON FALSE TRUST. [Serm. XVIII. 



ticable virtues? Did you find it impossible to resist occasions? 
Were your tendencies to pleasure so violent that you were not then 
their master? Ah! whence comes it then that they now tyran- 
nize with such dominion over your heart? Is it not, that having, 
through a fatal negligence, allowed them to usurp the command, 
they have ever since been too powerful to be conquered? Have 
you not forged, with your own hands, these chains? Look 
around you and see if so many just who bear (and from their 
earliest youth) the yoke, are even tempted in situations in which 
you are always certain to perish. Ah ! why then should you 
complain of a weakness which you have brought upon yourself? 
Why should you count, that what must irritate the Lord against 
you shall serve to appease him? What doth he see, when he 
sees the weakness of your inclinations? He sees the fruit of your 
crimes, the consequences of a licentious and sensual life : Is it 
here that you dare to appeal to Justice itself, to that Justice before 
which the righteous themselves entreat not to be judged? My 
God! upon what shall the sinner not flatter himself, since, in 
the most terrible of thy perfections, he finds reasons of con- 
fidence. 

The only rational and legitimate conclusion which it is per- 
mitted to you to draw from your own weakness, and from these 
inclinations for the world, and for pleasures, which, in spite of 
all your resolutions, hurry you away, is, that you have more occa- 
sion to watch, to lament, and to pray, than others; that, with 
more studious care, you ought to shun the dangers and the at- 
tractions of the senses and of the flesh. But then it is that you 
believe yourself invincible, when we exhort you to fly all pro- 
fane conversations, suspicious intercourses, doubtful pleasures, 
lascivious spectacles, and assemblies of sin. Ah ! you then de- 
fend yourself upon the ground that your innocence is in no 
degree injured there : You resign to weak souls all the precau- 
tions of flight and of circumspection: You tell us that every 
one must feel and know himself, and that those who are weak 
enough to be injured there, should in prudence keep away from 
them: But how can you expect that God shall have considera- 
tion for a weakness for which you have so little yourself? You 
are weak when there is question of excusing your crimes to him; 
you are no longer so when, upon that ground, it is necessary to 
adopt painful measures in order to continue faithful to him. 

But you will say, that if every thing be to be dreaded from 
his justice, at least his mercies are infinite; when his goodness 
should find nothing in us proper to touch him, would it not find 
motives sufficiently pressing in itself? This would be the third 
illusion of false trust which I should have to overthrow; but, 
besides that I have elsewhere sufliciently mentioned it, it is al- 
most time to conclude. I mean, therefore, my dear hearer, to 
ask you only one question: When you say that the goodness 
of God is infinite, what do you pretend to say? That he never 
punishes guilt? You would not dare to mean so. That he 



Serm. XVIIL] ON FALSE TRUST. 



317 



never abandons the sinner? The Sauls, the Antioclmses, the 
Pharaohs, have taught you the contrary. That the immodest, 
tlje worldly, the revengeful, the ambitious, shall be alike saved 
as the just? You know that nothing unclean shall enter hea- 
ven. That he hath not created man to render him eternally 
miserable? But wherefore hath he prepared a hell? That he 
hath already given you a thousand marks of his goodness? But 
that is what ought to overwhelm your ingratitude on the past, 
and to make you to dread every thing for the future. That he 
is not so terrible as it is said? But nothing is told of his justice 
but what he hath told you himself. That he would be under 
the necessity of damning almost all men were all that we say 
true? But the gospel declares to you, in express terms, that 
few shall be saved: That he punisheth not but at the worst? 
But every rejected grace may be the term of his mercies. That 
it costs him nothing to forgive? But hath he not the interests 
of his glory to attend to? That little is required to disarm him? 
But a change must take place, and the changing of the heart 
is the greatest of all his works. That that lively trust which 
you have in his goodness can come only from him? But what- 
ever leads not to him, by leading to repentance, can never come 
from him. What then do you mean to say ? That he will not re- 
ject the sacrifice of a broken and contrite heart? And behold, 
my dear hearer, what I have all along been preaching to you. 
Turn to the Lord, and then place your trust in him; whatever 
your crimes may be, his mercy is always open to the re- 
pentant sinner; throw yourself unreservedly upon his goodness 
for the permanence of your conversion, for perseverance in his 
service, for victory over the numerous obstacles which the enemy 
of salvation will continually be throwing in the way of your 
holy desires? the grace which he doth, in inspiring the feelings 
of a sincere penitence, is always a blessed presage of those which 
he prepareth: never mistrust his mercy; there is nothing but 
what may be expected from him, when it is the sorrow of ha- 
ving offended him which intreats it; never allow yourself to be 
cast down by the remembrance of your past iniquities; what- 
ever can be weeped can be pardoned: lock up in the bosom of 
his mercy the whole duration of the days which you have em- 
ployed in offending him; they will be as though they had never 
been: from the moment that you shall begin to serve him, you 
will begin to increase before him; a thousand years are only a 
day in his eyes, from the moment that your crimes are termi- 
nated by a sincere change: he is the God of sinners, the Bene- 
factor of the ungrateful, the Father of prodigal children, the 
Shepherd of strayed sheep, the Friend of Samaritans; in a word, 
all the consolations of faith seem to be for the repentant sinner. 

But if you continue to promise yourself, that, at last the 
time will come when you shall seriously think upon your sal- 
vation without doing it still; ah! remember, my dear hearer, 
that it is in that very way that almost all sinners have perished, 



318 



ON FALSE TRUST. CSerm. XVIII. 



and that it is the high-road to death in sin; remember that the 
sinner who often vainly desires, is never converted. Even the 
more you feel within you these unproductive impulses of sal- 
v ation, depend upon it that the more is your measure filled, and 
that every rejected grace draws you a degree nearer to hard- 
ness of heart; comfort yourself not upon desires which hasten 
your ruin, and which, in all times, have been the lot of the re- 
probate; and say often to the Lord, with the prophet. How 
long, O my God! shall I muse the secret anxieties of my soul 
with vain projects of penitence? How long shall I see my days 
flowing rapidly on in promising to my heart, in order to quiet 
it in its disorder, a sorrow and a repentance which are more 
and more distant from me? How long shall the enemy, taking 
advantage of my weakness, employ so gross an error to seduce 
me? Ah! dissipate this illusion which leads me astray; regard 
these feeble desires of salvation as the cries of a conscience 
which cannot be happy without thee ; accept these timid begin- 
nings of penitence; favourably attend to them now, O my God! 
when to me it seems that thy grace renders them more lively 
and more sincere; and complete, by thy inward operation, 
what is yet wanting to the fulness and to the sincerity of this 
offer; and perfect, in receiving, my desires, in order that they 
be worthy of the reward which thou promisest to those who 
hunger and thirst after righteousness. 

Hear, said the Lord in his prophet, to the unfaithful soul, 
you who live in ease and in pleasures, and who nevertheless 
hope in me; sterility, and widowhood shall at once burst upon 
your heads; sterility, that is to say, that you shall no longer be 
fit to bear the fruits of penitence; cultivation and watering 
shall be in vain; the power of my word, the virtue of my sacra- 
ments, the grace of my mysteries, all care shall be unavailing, 
and you shall no longer be but a withered tree alloted to the 
fire: widowhood, that is to say? I will for ever forsake you; I 
will leave you single; I will deliver you up to your inclinations, 
and to the false peace of your passions; I will no longer be your 
God, your protector, your spouse; I will for ever forsake you. 

But may I here finish my ministry, my brethren, with the 
words formerly made use of by Jesus Christ, in finishing his 
mission to an ungrateful people? You have refused to believe 
in me, said he to them a few days before his death; you have 
shut your eyes against the light; you have had ears, yet you 
heard not : I go, and you shall die in your blindness. If you 
were still blind, and if you had never known the truth, your 
sin would be more excusable; but at present, you see, I have 
announced to you the truths which my Father had taught me, 
and therefore your sin is without excuse; your obstinacy is con- 
summate; you have rejected that salvation which shall be of- 
fered to you no more, and the guilt of the truth despised must 
for ever be upon your head. 



Serm. XIX.] ON THE VICES AND VIRTUES, &c. 319 



Great God ! should this then be the price of my toils, and 
the whole fruit of my ministry? Could the un worthiness of 
the instrument, which thou hast employed to announce thy 
word, have destroyed its efficacy, and placed a fatal impediment 
to the progress of the gospel? No, my dear brethren, the virtue 
of the word of the cross is not attached to that of the minister 
who announces it. In the hands of the Lord, clay can give 
sight to the blind; and, when he pleaseth, the walls of Jericho 
fall at the sound of the weakest trumpets. I trust then in the 
Uord for you, my brethren, that having received his word with 
gladness, as Paul formerly said to the believers of Corinth, that, 
having received it, not as the word of man, but as the word of 
God, it shall fructify in you; and that, on the awful day of 
judgment, when account shall be demanded from me of my 
ministry, and from you of the fruit which you have reaped from 
it, I shall be your defence and your justification, and you my 
glory and my crown. So do I ardently wish it. 



SERMON XIX. 



ON THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE GREAT. 

Matthew iv. 8. 

And the Devil showeth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory 
of tliem; and saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou 
wilt fall down and worship me. 

Human prosperities have always been one of the most dan- 
gerous wiles employed by the devil to entrap men. He knows 
that the love of fame and of distinction is so natural to us, that, 
in general, nothing is considered as too much for their attain- 
ment; and that the use of them is so seducing, and so apt to 
lead astray, that nothing is more rare than piety surrounded 
with pomp and power. 

Nevertheless, it is God alone who raiseth up the great and 
the powerful; who placeth you above the rest, in order to be 
the fathers of the people, the comforters of the afflicted, the re- 
fuge of the helpless, the supports of the church, the protector 
of virtue, and the models of all believers. 

Suffer then, my brethren, that, entering into the spirit of our 
gospel, I here lay before you the dangers, as well as the advan- 



320 ON THE VICES AND VIRTUES [Serm. XIX. 



tages of your state; and that I point out to you the obstacles 
and the facilities which the rank, to which, through providence, 
you are born, presents to your discharge of the duties of a Chris- 
tian life. 

Great temptations, I confess, are attached to your station; 
but it has likewise as great resources; people of rank are born, 
it would seem, with more passions than the rest of men; yet 
have they also the opportunity of practising more virtues: their 
vices are followed with more consequences; but their piety be- 
comes also more beneficial : in a word, they are much more cul- 
pable than the people, when they forget their God; but they 
have likewise more merit in remaining faithful to him. 

My intention, therefore, at present, is to represent to you the 
extensive good, or the boundless evils, which always accompany 
your virtues or vices; to convince you of what influence the 
elevated rank to winch you are born, is towards good, or to- 
wards evil; and, lastly, to render irregularity odious to you, by 
unfolding the inexplicable consequences which your passions 
drag after them; and piety amiable, through the unutterable 
benefits which always follow your good examples. It would 
matter little to point out the dangers of your station, were the 
advantages of it not likewise to be shown. The Christian pul- 
pit declaims in general against the grandeurs and glory of the 
age; but it would be of little avail to be continually speaking 
of your complaints, were their remedies not held out to you 
at the same time. These are the two truths which I mean to 
unite in this discourse, by laying before you the endless conse- 
quences of the vices of the great and powerful, and what ines- 
timable benefits flow from their virtues. 

Part I. "A sore trial shall come upon the mighty, says the 
Spirit of God; for mercy will soon pardon the meanest; but 
mighty men shall be mightily tormented." 

It is not, my brethren, because he is mighty himself, that the 
Lord, as the Scriptures say, rejects the great and the mighty; 
or that rank and dignity are titles hateful in his eyes, to which 
his favours are denied, and which, of themselves, constitute our 
guilt. With the Lord there is no exception of persons: he is 
the Lord of the cedars of Lebanon, as well as of the humble 
hyssop of the valley: he causes his sun to rise over the highest 
mountains, as well as over the lowest and obscurest places: he 
hath formed the stars of heaven, as well as the worms which 
crawl upon the earth: the great are even more natural images 
of his greatness and glory, the ministers of his authority, the 
means through which his liberalities and generosity are poured 
out upon his people. And I come not here, my brethren, in 
the usual language, to pronounce anathemas against human 
grandeurs, and to make your station a crime, since that very 
station comes from God, and that the object in question is not so 



Serm. XIX.] OF THE GREAT. 



321 



much to exaggerate the perils of it, as to point out the infinite 
ways of salvation attached to that rank to which, through the 
will of Providence, you have been born. 

But, I say, that the sins of the great and powerful have 
two characters of enormity which render them infinitely more 
punishable before God than the sins of the commonalty of be- 
lievers. 1st, the scandal; 2dly, ingratitude. 

The scandal. There is no crime to which the gospel leaves 
less hopes of forgiveness than that of being a stumbling block 
to our brethren: " Wo unto the man," said Jesus Christ, "who 
shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me; it were 
better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and 
that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. 1st, Because 
you destroy a soul which ought eternally to have enjoyed God. 
2dly. Because you occasion your brother to perish, for whom 
Jesus Christ had died. 3dly, Because you become the minister of 
the devil's designs for the destruction of souls. 4thly, Because 
you are that man of sin, that antichrist of whom the apostle 
speaks; for Jesus Christ hath saved man, and you destroy him; 
Jesus Christ hath raised up true worshippers to his Father, and 
you deprive him of them; Jesus Christ hath gained us by his 
blood, and you snatch his conquest from him; Jesus Christ is the 
physician of souls, and you are their corrupter; he is their way, 
and you are their snare : he is the shepherd who comes in search 
of his perishing sheep, and you are the ravenous wolf which 
slays and destroys those his Father had given him. 5thly, Be- 
cause all other sins die, as I may say, with the sinner; but the 
fruit of his scandals will outlive him, and his crimes will not go 
down with him into the tomb of his fathers. 

Achan was punished with so much rigour for having taken 
only a wedge of gold from among the spoils which were conse- 
crated to the Lord. My God; what then shall be the punish- 
ment of him who deprives Jesus Christ of a soul which was his 
precious spoil, redeemed not with gold and silver but with all the 
divine blood of the Lamb without stain? The golden calf was 
reduced into powder for having occasioned the prevarication of 
Israel: Great God ! and could all the splendour which surrounds 
the great and the powerful shelter them from thy wrath, when 
their exaltation becomes only a stumbling block and a source 
of idolatry to the people? The brazen serpent itself, that sacred 
monument of God's mercies upon Judah, was broken in 
pieces for having been an occasion of scandal to the tribes: My 
God! and the sinner, already so odious through his own crimes, 
shall he be spared when he becomes a snare and a stumbling 
block to his brethren? 

Now, my brethren, such is the first character which always 
accompanies your sins, you who are exalted through rank or 
birth over the commonalty of believers: the scandal. The ob- 
scure and vulgar live only for themselves. Mingled in the 

x 



322 



ON THE VICES AND VIRTUES [Serm. XIX. 



crowd, and concealed by the abjectness of their lot from the 
eyes of men, God alone is the secret witness of their ways, and 
the invisible spectator of their backslidings; if they fall, or if 
they remain stedfast, it is for the Lord alone, who sees and who 
judges them; the world, which is unacquainted even with their 
names, is equally uninstructed by their examples; their life is 
without consequence; they may depart from the right path but 
they quit it alone; and if they accomplish not their own salva- 
tion, their ruin is, at least, confined to themselves, and has no 
influence over that of their brethren. 

But persons of an exalted station are like a public pageant, 
upon which all eyes are fixed; they are those houses built upon 
a summit, the sole situation of which renders them visible from 
afar; those flaming torches, the splendour of which at once be- 
trays and exposes them to Adew. Such is the misfortune of 
greatness and of rank; you no longer live for yourselves alone; 
to your destruction or to your salvation is attached the destruc- 
tion or the salvation of almost all those around you : your man- 
ners form the manners of the people; your examples are the 
rules of the multitude; your actions are as well known as your 
titles; it is impossible for you to err unknown to the public; 
and the scandal of your faults is always the melancholy privi- 
lege of your rank. 

I say, the scandal, 1st, of imitation. Men always willingly 
copy after evil, but more especially when held out by great ex- 
amples; they then ground a kind of vanity upon their errors, 
because it is through these that they resemble you; the people 
consider it as giving them an air of consequence to tread in your 
steps; the city thinks it an honour to adopt all the vices of the 
court; your manners form a poison which penetrates even into 
the provinces; which infects all stations, and gives a total change 
to the public manners; which decks out licentiousness with an 
air of nobility and spirit, and, in place of the simplicity of our 
ancient manners, substitutes the miserable novelty of your plea- 
sures, of your luxury, of your profusions, and of your profane 
indecencies. Thus from you it is that obscene fashions, vanity 
of dress, those artifices which dishonour a visage where modesty 
alone ought to be painted, the rage of gaming, freedom of man- 
ners, licentiousness of conversations, unbridled passions, and all 
the corruption of our ages, pass to the people. 

And from whence, think you, my brethren, comes that un- 
bridled licentiousness which reigns among the people? Those 
who live far from you, in the most distant provinces, still pre- 
serve, at least, some remains of their ancient simplicity and the 
primitive innocence; they live in a happy ignorance of the 
greatest part of those abuses which are now, through your exam- 
ples, become laws. But, the nearer the countries approach to you, 
the more is the change of manners visible, the more is in- 
nocence adulterated, the more the abuses are common, and the 



Serm. XIX.] OF THE GREAT. 



323 



greatest crime of the people is to be acquainted with your man- 
ners and your customs. After the chiefs of the tribes had en- 
tered into the tents of the daughters of Midian, all Judah went 
aside from the Lord, and few were to be found who had kept 
free from the general guilt. Great God ! how terrible shall one 
day be the trial of the great and powerful, since, besides their 
own endless passions, they shall be made accountable to thee for 
the public irregularities, the depravity of the manners, and the 
corruption of their age; and since even the sins of the people 
shall become their own special sins! 

2dly. A scandal of compliance. They endeavour to please, 
by imitating you; your inferiors, your creatures, your depend- 
ents, consider a resemblance to you as the high road to your 
favour: they copy your vices, because you hold them out to 
them as virtues; they enter into your fancies, in order to enter 
into your confidence; they outrival each other in copying, or 
in surpassing you, because, in your eyes, their greatest merit is 
in resembling you. Alas! how many weak souls, born with 
the principles of virtue, and who, far from you, would have nur- 
sed only those dispositions favourable to salvation, have had 
their innocence wrecked through the unfortunate necessity in 
which their fortune placed them of imitating you? 

3dly. A scandal of impunity. You could never reprehend, 
in your dependants, those abuses and those excesses which you 
allow to yourself: you are under a necessity of suffering in them 
what you have no inclination to refuse to yourself: your eyes 
must be shut upon disorders which are authorized by your own 
manners; and you are forced to pardon those who resemble you, 
lest you condemn yourself. A woman of the world, wholly de- 
voted to the art of pleasing, spreads through all her household 
an air of licentiousness and of worldliness; her house becomes 
a rock from whence innocence never departs uninjured; every 
one imitates at home what she displays abroad; and she must 
pass over these irregularities, because her own manners do not 
permit her to censure them. What excesses, in those houses 
kept open and appropriated to everlasting gaming, among that 
people, as I may say, of domestics, whom vanity hath multiplied 
beyond all number ! You know the truth of this, my brethren, 
and the dignity of the Christian pulpit does not forbid me from 
repeating it here. How dearly do these unfortunate wretches 
pay for your pleasures, who, out of your sight, and no check to re- 
strain them, fill up the idle time which your pleasures leave to 
them, in every excess adapted to the meanness of their educa- 
tion and their abject nature, and which they think themselves 
authorized in doing by your examples ! O my God, if he who 
neglects his people be worse in thy sight than an infidel, what 
then is the guilt of him who scandalizes them, and is the cause 
of their finding death and condemnation where they ought to 



324 ON THE VICES AND VIRTUES [Serm. XIX. 



have found the succours of salvation and the asylum of their 
innocence? 

4thly. A scandal of employment and of necessity. How many 
unfortunate wretches perish in order to feed your pleasures and 
your iniquitous passions? For you alone the dangerous arts sub- 
sist: the theatres are erected solely for your criminal recrea- 
tions; profane harmonies every where resound, and corrupt so 
many hearts only to flatter the corruption of yours; the works, 
fatal to innocence, are transmitted to posterity solely through 
the favour of your names and protection. It is you alone, my 
brethen, who give to the world lascivious poets, pernicious au- 
thors, and profane writers; it is to please you that these cor- 
rupters of the public manners perfect their talents, and seek 
their exaltation and fortune in a success, the only end of which 
is the destruction of souls: it is you alone who protect, reward, 
and produce them; who take from them, by honouring them 
with your familiarity, that mark of disgrace and infamy with 
which they had been stigmatized by the laws of the church and 
of the state, and which degraded them in the eyes of men. 

Thus it is through you that the people participatfe in these 
dabaucheries; that this poison infects the cities and provinces; 
that these public pleasures become the source of the public mi- 
series and licentiousness; that so many unfortunate victims re- 
nounce their modesty to gratify your pleasures, and, seeking to 
improve the mediocrity of their fortune by the exercise of talents 
which your passions alone have rendered useful and recommend- 
able, come upon criminal theatres to express passions for the 
gratification of yours; to perish in order to please; to sacrifice 
their innocence, in occasioning the loss of it to those who listen 
to them; to become public rocks, and the scandal of religion; 
to bring misery and dissension even into your families, and to 
punish you, woman of the world, for the support and the credit 
which you give them by your presence and your applauses, by 
becoming the criminal object of the passion and of the ill- 
conduct of your children, and perhaps dividing with yourself 
the heart of your husband, and completely ruining his affairs 
and fortune. 

5thly. A scandal of duration. It is little, my brethren, that 
the corruption of our age is almost wholly the work of the great 
and powerful; the ages to come will likewise be indebted to you, 
perhaps, for a part of their licentiousness and excesses. Those 
profane poems, which have seen the light solely through your 
means, shall still corrupt hearts in the following ages; those 
dangerous authors, whom you honour with your protection, 
shall pass into the hands of your posterity; and your crimes 
shall be multiplied with that dangerous venom which they con- 
tain, and which shall be communicated from age to age. Even 
your passions, immortalized in history, after having been a 
scandal in their time, will also become one in the following ages: 



Serm. XIX.] OF THE GREAT. 



325 



the reading of your errors, preserved to posterity, shall raise up 
imitators after your death; instructions in guilt will be sought 
for in the narrative of your adventures; and your excesses shall 
not expire with you. The voluptuousness of Solomon still 
furnishes blasphemies and derisions to the impious, and motives 
of confidence to libertinism; the infamous passion of Potiphar's 
wife hath been preserved down to us, and her rank hath im- 
mortalized her weakness. Such is the destiny of the vices and 
of the passions of the great and powerful: they do not live for 
their own age alone; they live for the ages to come, and the 
duration of their scandal hath no other limits than that of their 
name. 

You know this to be a truth, my brethren. Do they not, at 
present, continue to read, with new danger, those scandalous 
memoirs composed in the age of our fathers, which have trans- 
mitted down to us the excesses of the preceding courts, and 
immortalized the passions of the principal persons who figured 
in them? The irregularities of an obscure people, and of the rest 
of men who then lived, remain sunk in oblivion: their passions 
terminated with them; their vices, obscure as their names, 
have escaped history; and, with regard to us, they areas though 
they had never been; and the errors of those who are distinguish- 
ed in their age by their rank and birth, are all that now remains 
to us of these past times. It is their passions that continually 
inflame new ones, even at this day, through the licentiousness 
of, and the open manner in which they are mentioned by the 
authors who hand them down to us; and the sole privilege of 
their condition is, that, while the vices of the lower orders of 
people sink with themselves, those of the great and the power- 
ful spring up again, as I may say, from their ashes, pass from 
age to age, are engraven on the public monuments, and are 
never blotted out from the memory of men. What crimes, great 
God! which are the scandal of all ages, the rock of all stations, 
and which, even to the end, shall serve as an excitement to vice ? 
as a pretext to the sinner, and as a lasting model of debauchery 
and licentiousness ! 

Lastly, A scandal of seduction. Your examples, in honour- 
ing vice, render virtue contemptible; the Christian life becomes 
so ridiculous, that those who profess it are almost ashamed of it 
before you; the exterior of piety has an ungracious and awk- 
ward appearance, which is concealed in your presence, as if it 
were a bent which dishonours the mind. How many souls, 
touched by God, only resist his grace and his spirit through 
the dread of forfeiting with you that degree of confidence which 
a long society in pleasures hath given to them ! How many souls, 
disgusted with the world, yet who have not the courage to de- 
clare themselves, and return to God, lest they expose themselves 
to your senseless derisions, still continue to copy your manners, 
upon which they have been fully undeceived by grace, and, 
through an unrighteous complaisance and respect for your rank, 



326 



ON THE VICES AND VIRTUES [Sekm. XIX. 



take a thousand steps from which their new faith and likewise 
their inclination are equally distant ! 

I speak not of the prejudices which you perpetuate in the 
world against virtue; of those lamentable discourses against 
the godly, which your authority confirms; which pass from you 
to the people, and keep up, in all stations, those ancient pre- 
possessions against piety, and those continual derisions of the 
righteous, which deprive virtue of all its dignity, and harden 
sinners in vice. 

And from thence, my brethren, how many righteous seduced ! 
How many weak led astray ! How many wavering souls retain- 
ed in sin ! How many impious and libertine souls strengthened ! 
What an obstacle do you become to the fruit of our ministry ! 
How many hearts, already prepared, oppose, to the force of the 
truth which we announce, only the long engagements which 
bind them to your manners and to your pleasures, and find within 
themselves only you who serve as a wall and a buckler against 
grace ! My God ! what a scourge for the age, what a misfortune 
for the people, is a grandee according to the world, who lives not 
in the fear of thee, who knows thee not, and who acts in con- 
tempt of thy laws and eternal ordinances ! It is a present which 
thou sendest to men in thy wrath, and the most dreadful mark 
of thine indignation upon the cities and upon the kingdoms. 

Yes, my brethren, behold what you are when you belong not 
to God. Such is the first character of your faults, the scandal. 
Your lot decides in general that of the people: the excesses of 
the lower ranks are always the consequence of your excesses; 
and the transgressions of Jacob, said the prophet, that is to say, 
of the people and of the tribes, came only from Samaria, the 
seat of the great and of the mighty. 

But, even granting that no new degree of enormity should be 
specially attached to the great by the scandal inseparable from 
their sins, ingratitude, which forms the second character of 
them, would be amply sufficient to attract, upon their heads, 
that neglect of God by which his bowels are for ever shut to 
compassion and clemency. 

I say ingratitude: for God hath preferred you to so many 
unfortunate fellow-creatures who languish in obscurity and in 
want! he hath exalted you, and hath caused you to be born 
amid splendour and abundance; he hath chosen you above all 
the people to load you with benefits; in you alone he hath as- 
sembled riches, honours, titles, distinctions, and all the advan- 
tages of the earth; it would seem that his providence watches 
only for you, while so many unfortunate millions eat the bread 
of tribulation and of sorrow; the earth seems to be produced for 
you alone; the sun to rise and to go down solely for you; even 
the rest of men seem born only for you, and to contribute to 
your grandeur and purposes; it would appear that the Lord is 
occupied solely with you, while he neglecteth so many obscure 



Serm. XIX.] OF THE GREAT. 



souls whose days are days of sorrow and want, and for whom 
it would seem that there is no God upon earth; yet, neverthe- 
less, you turn against God all that you have received from his 
hands; your abundance serves for the indulgence of your pas- 
sions; your exaltation facilitates your criminal pleasures, and his 
blessings become your crimes. 

Yes, my brethren, while thousands of unfortunate fellow- 
creatures, upon whom his hand is so heavy; while an obscure 
populace, for whom life has nothing but hardships and toil, in- 
voke and bless him, raise up their hands to him in the simpli- 
city of their heart, regard him as their father, and give him every 
mark of an unaffected piety, and of a sincere religion — you, 
whom he loads with his benefits; you, for whom the entire 
world seems to be made, you acknowledge him not; you deign 
not to lift up your eyes to him; you never bestow even a mo- 
ment's reflection whether there be or be not a God above you 
who interferes in the things of the earth: in place of thanks- 
givings you return him insults, and religion is only for the 
people. 

Alas ! you think it so mean and so ungenerous when those, 
whose advancement was your work, neglect you, deny their obli- 
gations, and even employ that credit which they owe solely to you, 
in thwarting and in ruining you. But, my brethren, they 
only act by you as you do towards your God. Is not your exal- 
tation his work? Is it not his hand alone which hath separated 
your ancestors from the crowd, and hath placed them at the 
head of the people? Is it not through his providence alone that 
you are born of an illustrious blood, and that you enjoy, from 
your birth, what a whole life of care and of toil could never have 
afforded you reason to expect? What had you in his eyes more 
than so many unfortunate fellow-creatures whom he leaveth in 
want ! Ah ! if he had paid regard only to the natural qualities 
of the soul, to probity, honesty, modesty, innocence; how many 
obscure souls, born with all these virtues, might have been pre- 
ferred, and would now have been occupying your place? If he 
had consulted only the use which you were one day to make of his 
benefits; how many unfortunate souls, had they been placed in 
your situation, would have been an example to the people, the 
protectors of virtue, and in their abundance would have glori- 
fied God, they who even in their indigence invoke and bless 
him; while you, on the contrary, are the cause of his name be- 
ing blasphemed, and your example becomes a seduction for his 
people? 

He chooseth you, however, and rejecteth them; he humbleth 
them and exalteth you; for them he is a hard and severe mas- 
ter, and for you a liberal and bountiful father. What more 
could he have done to engage you to serve and to be faithful to 
him? What more powerful attraction, or more likely to secure 
the homages of hearts than benefits; " Thine, O Lord," said 



328 ON THE VICES AND VIRTUES [Serm. XIX. 



David at the height of all his prosperity, "is the greatness, and 
the power and the glory: both riches and honour come from 
thee; and in thine hand it is to make great, and to give strength 
unto all. It is just then, O my God, to glorify thee in thy gifts; 
to measure what I owe thee upon what thou hast done for me, 
and to render mine exaltation, my greatness, and all that I am, 
subservient to thy glory." 

Yet, nevertheless, my brethren, the more he hath done for 
you, the more do you raise yourselves up against him. It is 
the rich and the powerful who live without other God in this 
world than their iniquitous pleasures. It is you alone who 
dispute the slightest homages to him; who believe yourselves to 
be dispensed from whatever is irksome or severe in his law; 
who fancy yourselves born for the sole purpose of enjoying your- 
selves, of applying his benefits to the gratification of your pas- 
sions, and who remit to the common people the care of serving 
him, of returning him thanks, and of religiously observing the 
ordinances of his holy law. 

Thus frequently the people worship and you insult him; 
the people appease, and you provoke him; the people invoke, 
and you neglect him; the people zealously serve him, and you 
look down upon his servants; the people are continually rais- 
ing up their hands to him, and you doubt whether he even ex- 
ists; you who alone feel the effects of his liberality and of his 
power; his chastisements form worshippers to him, and his be- 
nefits are followed with only derisions and insults. 

I say his benefits: For, with regard to you, he hath not con- 
fined them to the mere external advantages of fortune. He hath 
likewise produced you with more favourable dispositions to 
virtue than the simple people; a heart more noble, and more 
exalted; happier inclinations; sentiments more worthy of the 
grandeur of faith; more understanding, elevation of mind, 
knowledge, instruction, and relish for good : You have received 
from nature, milder passions, more cultivated manners, and all 
the other incidental advantages of high birth; that politeness 
which softens the temper; that dignity which restrains the sallies 
of the disposition; that humanity which renders you more open 
to the impressions of grace. How many benefits do you then 
abuse, when you live not according to God! What a monster 
is a man of high rank, loaded with honours and prosperity, who 
never lifts up his eyes to heaven to worship the hand which be- 
stows them! 

And whence, think you, come the public calamities, the 
scourges with which the cities and provinces are afflicted? It is 
solely in punishment of your iniquitous abuse of abundance, 
that God sometimes striketh the land with barrenness. His 
justice, irritated that you turned his own benefits against him- 
self, withdraws them from your passions; curses the land; per- 
mits wars and dissensions; crumbles your fortune into dust; 
extinguishes your families; withers the root of your posterity; 



Serm. XIX.] OF THE GREAT. 



329 



makes your titles and possessions to pass into the hands of stran- 
gers; and holds you out as striking examples of the inconstancy 
of human affairs and the anticipated monuments of his wrath 
against hearts equally ungrateful and insensible to the paternal 
cares of his providence. 

Such, my brethren, are the two characters inseparable from 
your- sins; the scandal and the ingratitude: behold what you 
are when you depart from God; and this is what you have never 
perhaps paid attention to. From the moment that you are 
guilty, you cannot be indifferently so. The passions are the 
same in the people and among the powerful; but very different 
is the guilt ; and a single one of your crimes often leads to more 
miseries, and hath, before God, more extended and more terrible 
consequences, than a whole life of iniquity in an obscure and 
vulgar soul. But your virtues have also the same advantage 
and the same lot: and this is what remains for me to prove in 
the last part of this discourse. 

Part II. If scandal and ingratitude be the inseparable con- 
sequences of the vices and passions of persons of high rank, 
their virtues have also two particular characters, which render 
them far more acceptable to God than those of common be- 
lievers: firstly, the example; secondly, the authority. And this, 
my brethren, is a truth highly consoling to you, who are placed 
by providence in an exalted station, and well calculated to an- 
imate you to serve God, and to render virtue lovely to you. 
For it is an illusion to consider the rank to which you are born 
as an obstacle to salvation, and to the duties imposed upon us 
by religion. The rocks are more dangerous there, I confess, 
than in an obscure lot, — the temptation stronger and more fre- 
quent; and while pointing out the advantages, with regard to 
salvation, of high rank, I pretend not to conceal those dangers 
which Jesus Christ himself hath pointed out to us in the gospel, 
as being attached to it. 

I mean only to establish this truth, that you may do more 
for God than the common people; that infinitely more advan- 
tages accrue to religion from the piety of a single person of dis- 
tinction, than from that of almost a whole people of believers: 
and that you are so much the more culpable when you neglect 
God, in proportion to the glory that he would draw from your 
fidelity, and that your virtues have more extended consequences 
for the edification of believers. 

The first is the example. A soul from among the people who 
fears God, glorifies him only in his own heart: he is a child of 
light, who walks, as I may say, amid darkness: he pays his 
own homage, but he attracts no others to him: Shut up in the 
obscurity of his fortune, he lives under the eyes of God alone ; 
he wishes that his name be glorified, and, by these desires, he 
renders to him that glory which he cannot do by his examples: 



330 



ON THE VICES AND VIRTUES [Serm. XIX. 



his virtues tend to his own salvation: but they are as lost for 
the salvation of his brethren: he is here below as a treasure 
hidden in the earth, which the vineyard of Jesus Christ beareth 
unwittingly, and of which he maketh no use. 

But for you, my brethren, who live exposed to the view of 
the public, and whose eyes are always upon you, your virtuous 
examples become equally shining as your names : you spread the 
good savour of Jesus Christ wherever that of your rank and 
titles is spread: you make the name of the Lord to be glorified 
wherever your own is known: the same elevation which makes 
you to be known upon the earth, likewise informs all men what 
you do for heaven : the wonders of grace are every where seen in 
your natural advantages; the people, the cities, the provinces, 
who are continually hearing your names repeated, feel, awaken- 
ed with them, that idea of virtue which your examples have 
attached to them: You honour piety in the opinion of the pub- 
lic: you preach it to those whom you know not: you become, 
says the prophet, like a signal of virtue raised up amid the peo- 
ple: a whole kingdom has its eyes upon you, and speaks of 
your examples, and even abroad your piety becomes equally 
known as your birth. 

Now, amid this general estimation, what attraction to virtue 
for the people ! 1st, The great models are more striking, and, 
when countenanced by the great, piety becomes as it were fa- 
shionable with the people. 2dly, That idea of weakness com- 
monly attached to virtue is dissipated from the moment that 
you ennoble it, as I may say, with your names, and that they 
can produce your examples in honour of it. Sdly? The rest of 
men no longer blush at modesty and frugality, when they see, 
in your instance, that modesty is perfectly compatible with 
greatness; and that to shun luxury and profusion is so far from 
being a subject of shame to any rank whatever, that, on the 
contrary, it adds lustre and dignity to the highest rank and 
birth. 4thly, How many weak souls, who would blush at vir- 
tue, are confirmed by your example, are no longer afraid of 
acting as you act, and who even pride themselves in following 
your steps ! 5thly, How many souls, still too attached to worldy 
interests, would dread lest piety should be an obstacle to their 
advancement, and perhaps find, in this temptation, an effectual 
bar to all their penitential desires, if they were not taught, in 
seeing you, that piety is useful to all, and that, while attracting 
the favours of Heaven, they do not prevent those of the earth ! 
6thly, Your inferiors, your creatures, and all who depend upon 
you, view virtue in a much more amiable light, since it is be- 
come a certain way of pleasing you, and that their progress in 
your confidence and esteem depends upon their advancement 
in piety. 

Lastly, What an honour to religion, when, in your persons, 
she proves that she is still capable of forming righteous mem 



Seem. XIX.] 



OF THE GREAT. 



331 



who despise honours, dignities, and riches; who live amidst 
prosperity without being dazzled with it; who enjoy the first 
places without losing sight of eternal riches; who possess all, 
as though possessing nothing; who are greater than the whole 
world, and consider as dirt all the advantages of the earth, 
whenever they become an obstacle to promises held out by faith 
in heaven ! What confusion for the wicked to feel, in seeing 
you treading the paths of salvation amidst every human pro- 
sperity? that virtue is not an adoption of despair! that they 
vainly endeavour to persuade themselves, that recourse is had 
to God only when forsaken by the world, since you fail not, 
though loaded with all the favours of the world, to love the 
shame of Jesus Christ! What consolation, even for our minis- 
try, to be enabled to employ your examples in these Christian 
pulpits, in overthrowing the sinners of a more obscure lot; to 
cite your virtues to make them blush at their vices; to cover 
with shame all their vain excuses, by proving your fidelity to 
the law of God; that their dangers are not greater than yours; 
that the objects of their passions are less seductive; that more 
charms and more illusions are not held out by the world to them 
than to you; that if grace can raise up faithful hearts even in 
the palaces of kings, it must be equally able to form them under 
the roof of the citizen and of the magistrate, and, consequently, 
that salvation is open to all, and that our station becomes a fa- 
vourable pretext to our passions, only when the corruption of 
our hearts is the true reason which authorizes them. 

Yes, my brethren, I repeat, that, in serving God, you give a 
new force to our ministry; more weight to the truths announ- 
ced by us to the people; more confidence to our zeal; more 
dignity to the word of Jesus Christ; more credit to our censures; 
more consolation to our toils; and, in viewing you, the world 
is convinced of truths which it had disputed with us. What 
benefits then accrue from your examples ! You accredit piety, 
and honour religion in the mind of the people; you animate 
the righteous of every station; you console the servants of 
God; you spread throughout a whole kingdom a savour of life 
that overthrows vice and countenances virtue; you support the 
rules of the gospel against the maxims of the world: you are 
cited in the cities and in the most distant provinces to encourage 
the weak, and to aggrandize the kingdom of Jesus Christ; 
fathers teach your names to their children, to animate them to 
virtue; and, without knowing it, you become the model of the 
people, the conversation of the lower orders, the edification of 
families, the example of every station and of every class. Scarce- 
ly had the heads of the tribes in the desert, and the most dis- 
tinguished women, brought to Moses their most precious orna- 
ments for the construction of the tabernacle, when all the people, 
incited by their example, presented themselves in crowds to 
offer their gifts and their presents; and Moses was even under 



332 ON THE VICES AND VIRTUES [Serm. XIX. 



the necessity of placing bounds to their pious alacrity, and of 
moderating the excess of their liberalities. 

Ah ! my brethren, what good, once more, may your examples 
do among the people ! Public dissipations discredited from the 
moment that you cease to countenance them; indecent fashions 
proscribed whenever you neglect them; dangerous customs an- 
tiquated as soon as you forsake them; the source of almost all 
disorders dried up from the moment that you live according to 
God. And how many souls thereby saved! What evils pre- 
vented! What crimes checked! What misfortunes hindered! 
What gain for religion is a single person of rank, who lives ac- 
cording to faith ! What a present doth God make to the earth, 
to a kingdom, to a people, when he bestoweth grandees who 
live in his fear! And, should the interest even of your own 
60ul be insufficient to render virtue amiable to you, should not 
the interest of so many souls, to whom, by living according to 
God, you are an occasion of salvation, induce you to prefer the 
fear and the love of his law to all the vain pleasures of the 
earth? Is the heart capable of tasting a more exquisite pleasure 
than that of being a source of salvation and of benediction to our 
brethren? 

And what is yet more fortunate here for you is, that you do 
not live for your own age alone : I have already observed that 
your examples will pass to the following ages: the virtues of 
the simple believers perish, as I may say, with them, but your 
virtues will be recorded in history with your names. You will 
become a pious model for our posterity, equally as you have 
been so for the people of your own times: connected, through 
your rank and your employments, with the principal events of 
our age, you will be transmitted with them to the ages to come. 
Succeeding courts will still find the history of your piety and 
of your manners blended with the public history of our days; 
you will cU> credit to piety even in the ages to follow; the me- 
mory of your virtues, preserved in our annals, will still serve 
as an instruction to those of your descendants who shall read 
them; and it shall one day be said of you, as of those men full 
of glory and of righteousness, mentioned by Scripture, that your 
piety hath not finished with you: that your bodies, indeed, are 
buried in peace, but that your name liveth for evermore; that 
your seed standeth for ever, and that your name shall not be 
blotted out. 

Nor is this all: the example renders your virtues a public 
good, which is their first character; but authority, which is their 
second, finishes and sustains the endless good which your ex- 
amples have begun. And, in speaking of the authority, why 
can I not here unfold all the immensity of the fruitful conse- 
quences of the piety of the great, which this idea excites in my 
mind? 

1st. The protection of virtue. Timid virtue is often oppress- 



Serm. XIX.] 



OF THE GREAT. 



333 



ed, because it wants either boldness to show itself, or protection 
to defend it; obscure virtue is often despised, because nothing ex- 
alts it to the eyes of the senses, and the world is delighted to turn 
into a crime against piety the obscurity of those who practise it. 
But, so soon as you adopt its cause, ah ! virtue no longer wants 
protection: you become the interpreters of the godly with the 
prince, and the channels by which they find continual access to 
the throne; you bring righteous characters into oflice, who be- 
come public examples; you bring to light servants of God, men 
of learning and of virtue, who would have remained in the dust, 
and who, through favour of your support, appear to the public, 
employ their talents, contribute to the edification of believers, 
to the instruction of the people, to the consummation of the holy: 
teach the rules of virtue to those who know them not, will teach 
them to our descendants, and will hand down, to all ages to 
come, with the pious monuments of their own zeal, the immortal 
fruits of that protection with which you have honoured virtue, 
and of your love for the righteous. 

What shall I say? You strengthen the zeal of the godly in 
holy undertakings; and your protection animates and enables 
them to conquer all the obstacles which the demon constantly 
throws in the way of works which are to glorify God and to 
contribute to the salvation of souls. What noble foundations and 
pious designs, now carried into execution, would have failed, if 
the authority of a righteous man in office had not removed the 
impediments which rendered their accomplishment apparently 
impossible ! 

What more shall I say? By your examples you render virtue 
respectable to those who love it not, and they are no longer 
ashamed of being a Christian from the moment that they therein 
resemble you. You divest impiety of that air of confidence 
and of ostentation with which it dares to show itself, and freethink- 
ing ceases to be fashionable as soon as you declare against it. You 
maintain the religion of our fathers among the people; you pre- 
serve faith to the following ages; and often it requires only a single 
person of rank in a kingdom, firm in faith, to stop the progress of 
error and innovation, and to preserve to a whole people the faith 
of their ancestors. The single Esther saved the people and the 
law of God in a great empire; Matthias individually stood out 
against foreign altars, and prevented superstitions from prevail- 
ing in the midst of Judah. Oh ! my brethren, how grand when 
you belong to Jesus Christ! And with what superior lustre 
and dignity do your rank and your birth appear in the vast 
fruits of your piety, than in the luxury of your passions, and in 
all the vain pomp of human magnificence ! 

2dly, The rewards of virtue. You render it honourable by 
giving it that preference which is its due, in the choice of places 
dependent upon you, and in intrusting with employments only 



334 ON THE VICES AND VIRTUES [Serm. XIX. 



those whose piety entitles them to the public confidence; by 
placing dependence upon the fidelity of your inferiors only in 
proportion as they are faithful to God, and, in men, looking 
principally for rectitude of heart and innocence of manners, 
without which all other talents no longer form but an equivocal 
merit, either injurious to themselves, or useless to the public. 

And from thence, what new weal to the public ! What hap- 
piness for a kingdom in which the godly occupy the first places; 
where employments are the rewards of virtue; where the pub- 
lic affairs are intrusted only to those who have more the public 
interest in view than their own, and who consider as nothing 
the gain of the whole world if they thereby lose their soul ! 

What advantage for the people when they find their fathers 
in their judges; the protectors of their helplessness in the ar- 
biters of their lot; the consolers of their sufferings in the in- 
terpreters of their interests ! What abuses prevented ! What 
tears wiped away! WTiat crimes avoided! What harmony in 
families ! What consolation for the unfortunate ! What a com- 
pliment even to virtue, when the people are rejoiced to see it 
in office, and when the world, all worldly as it is, is, however, 
well pleased to have the godly for its defenders and judges! 
WTiat an attraction to virtue, when it is seen to have the pro- 
mise, not only of the life that now is, but of that also which is 
to come! 

And say not, my brethren, that, in rewarding virtue, sinners 
are not corrected, but only hypocrites multiplied. I know how 
far men may be carried by a thirst of advancement, and what abu- 
ses they are capable of making of religion in order to accomplish 
their ends: but, at least, you force vice to hide itself; you di- 
vest it of that notoriety and security which spread and commu- 
nicate it; you preserve the externals of religion among the people; 
you multiply the examples of piety among believers, and if li- 
centiousness be not in reality diminished, at least the scandals 
are more rare ! 

Lastly, The holy liberalities of virtue. But I feel that my sub- 
ject leads me away, and it is time to conclude. Yes, my brethren, 
what an additional fund of comfort for the people in the Chris- 
tian and charitable use of your riches: You shelter innocence; 
you open asylums of penitence for guilt; you render virtue 
lovely to the unfortunate by the resources which they find in 
yours; you secure to husbands the fidelity of their wives; to fa- 
thers the salvation of their children! to pastors the safety of 
their flock; peace to families, comfort to the afflicted, innocence 
to the deserted widow, an aid to the orphan, good order to the 
public, and, to all, the support of their virtue, or the cure of their 
vices. 

And here, my brethren, could you but comprehend the wide- 
extended fruits of your virtue, and the inexplicable advantages 



Serm. XIX.] 



OF THE GREAT. 



335 



accruing from it to the church: What scandals avoided! What 
crimes prevented ! What public scourges checked ! How many- 
weak preserved! How many righteous sustained! How many 
sinners recalled ! How many souls withdrawn from the precipice ! 
How much you contribute to the aggrandizement of the king- 
dom of Jesus Christ, to the honour of religion, to the consumma- 
tion of the holy, and to the salvation of all believers ! How many 
of the chosen of every tongue and of every tribe shall one day 
in heaven, place at your feet their crown of immortality, as if 
publicly to acknowledge their obligation to you! What con- 
solation to be able to say to yourself, that, in serving God, you 
will attract other servants to him, and that your piety becomes 
a blessing upon the people ! No, my brethren, if there be any 
thing flattering in rank, it is not those vain distinctions attached 
to it by custom: it is the power of becoming, by serving God, 
the source of public blessings, the support of religion, the con- 
solation of the church, and the chief instruments employed by 
God for the accomplishment of his merciful designs upon men. 

Ah ! What then do you not lose when you do not live accor- 
ding to God ! What do we ourselves not lose when you are want- 
ing to us ! Of how many advantages do you deprive believers ! 
Of what consolations do you not deprive yourselves ! What joy 
in heaven for the conversion of a single great sinner in the age ! 
How highly criminal when you live not according to God ! You 
can neither be saved nor condemned alone. You resemble either 
that dragon of the Revelation, who, being cast out from heaven 
into the earth, drags after him in his fall so many of the stars; 
or that mysterious serpent spoken of by Jesus Christ, who be- 
ing exalted upon the earth, haply attracts all after him. You are 
established for the ruin or for the salvation of many; public 
scourges or comforts. May you, my brethren, know your true 
interests; may you feel what you are in the designs of God, how 
much you have it in your power to do for his glory, how much 
he expecteth of you, how much the church, and even we our- 
selves expect of you ! Ah ! you have so high an idea of your 
rank and of your stations with relation to the world ! 

But, my brethren, permit me to say it to you: You are yet 
unacquainted with all their greatness; you see but the humblest 
part of what you are; you are still greater with relation to 
piety? and the privileges of your virtue are much more illus- 
trious and more marked than those of your titles. May you, 
my brethren, act up to your lot ! And thou, O my God ! touch, 
during these days of salvation, through the force of that truth 
with which thou fillest our mouths, the great and the powerful; 
draw to thyself those hearts upon whose conquest depends that 
of the rest of believers; have compassion upon thy people by 
sanctifying those whom thy providence hath placed at their 
head; save Israel, in saving those who rule it; give to thy 



336 INJUSTICE OF THE WORLD. [Serm. XX. 



church great examples, who perpetuate virtue from age to age; 
and who assist, even to the end, in forming that immortal as- 
sembly of the righteous which shall bless thy name for ever 
and ever. 



SERMON XX. 

ON THE INJUSTICE OF THE WORLD TOWARDS 
THE GODLY. 

John ix. 24. 

Give God the praise: we knoiv that this mail is a sinner. 

What can the purest and most irreproachable virtue expect 
from the injustice of the world, seeing it hath formerly found 
subjects for scandal and censure in the sanctity even of Jesus 
Christ? If, before their eyes, he work wonderful miracles; if, 
on this occasion, he restore sight to the blind, the Jews accuse 
him of being a Sabbath-breaker; of working miracles through 
Beelzebub rather than in the name of the Lord, and of only 
wishing, through these impostures, to overturn and to destroy 
the law of Moses; that is to say, that they attack his intentions, 
in order to render suspicious and to criminate his works. 

If he honour with his presence the table of the Pharisees, 
that he may have an opportunity of recalling and instructing 
them, he is looked upon as a sinner, and as a lover of good 
cheer: that is to say, that they make a crime to him of his 
works, when they find it convenient not to search into the in- 
tegrity of his intentions. 

Lastly, if he appear in the temple, armed with zeal and se- 
verity, to avenge the profanations which disgrace that holy 
place, the zeal with which he is inflamed for the glory of his 
Father is no longer in their mouth, but an unjust usurpation of 
an authority which belongs not to him: that is to say, that they 
exercise themselves in vague and unfounded reproaches, when 
they have nothing to say against his intentions or his works. 

I say, and I say it with sorrow, that the piety of the godly 
doth not, at present, experience more indulgence amongst us, 
than the sanctity of Jesus Christ formerly met with in Judea. 
The pious are become objects of censure and derision to the 
public; and in an age where dissipation is become so general, 



Serm. XX.] TOWARDS THE GODLY. 



337 



where scandalous excesses of every kind furnish such ample 
matter to the malignity of conversations and censures, favour 
is liberally shown to all, excepting to virtue and innocence. 

Yes, my brethren, if the conduct of the godly be apparently 
irreproachable, and furnish no materials for censure, you fix 
yourselves on their intentions which appear not; you accuse 
them of labouring towards their own purposes, and of having 
their own particular views and designs. 

If their virtue seem to draw nearer to an equality with our 
own, and sometimes abate from its severity to attach us to God, 
by an ostensible conformity to our manners and customs; with- 
out searching into, or giving yourselves any concern about their 
intentions, you constitute, as a crime in them, the most inno- 
cent complaisances, and concessions the most worthy of indul- 
gence. 

Lastly, If their virtue, inspired by a divine fire, no longer 
keep measures with the world, and leave nothing to be alleged 
against either their intentions or their works, then you exer- 
cise yourselves in vague discourses, and unfounded reproaches 
against even their zeal and piety. 

Now, suffer me, my brethren, for once, to stand up against 
an abuse so disgraceful to religion, so injurious to that Being 
who forms the holy, so scandalous among Christians, so like- 
ly to draw down upon us those lasting curses which formerly 
turned the inheritance of the Lord into a deserted and forsaken 
land, and so worthy of the zeal of our ministry. 

You attack the intentions, when you have nothing to say 
against the works of the godly: and that is a temerity. You 
exaggerate their weaknesses, and you make a crime to them of 
the slightest imperfections; and that is an inhumanity. You 
turn even their zeal and fervour into ridicule and that is an 
impiety. And behold, my brethren, the three descriptions of 
the world's injustice towards the pious. An injustice of te- 
merity, which always suspects their intentions : An injustice of 
inhumanity, which gives no palliation to the slightest imperfect 
tions . An injustice of impiety, which, of their zeal and sancti- 
ty, makes a subject of contempt and derision. May these truths, 
O my God ! render to virtue that honour and glory which are 
due to it, and force the world itself to respect the pious charac- 
ters whom it is unworthy to possess ! 

Part I. Nothing is more sublime, or more worthy of vene- 
ration on the earth, than true virtue : the world itself is forced 
to acknowledge this truth. The elevation of sentiment, the 
nobility of motive, the empire over the passions, the patience 
under adversity, the gentleness under injuries, the contempt of 
one's self under praise, the courage under difficulties, the auster- 
ity in pleasures, the fidelity in duties, the equality of temper in 
all events with which philosophy hath decked out its imaginary 
sage, find their reality only in the disciple of the gospel. The 

Y 



/ 



338 



INJUSTICE OF THE WORLD [Serm. XX. 



more our manners are even corrupted, the more our times are 
dissolute, the more doth a just soul, who, in the midst of the 
general corruption, knows how to preserve his righteousness and 
his innocence, merit the puhlic admiration; and if the pagans 
themselves so highly respected Christians, in a time when all 
Christians were holy, with much greater reason are those Chris- 
tians, who set up to the name of Christian, worthy of our vene- 
ration and respect, at this period, when sanctity is become so 
rare among believers. 

How melancholy then for oar ministry, that the corruption 
of manners should oblige us to do here what the first defenders 
of faith formerly did with so much dignity before the Pagan 
tribunals; that is to say, to make the apology of the servants of 
Jesus Christ ; and that it should be necessary to teach Christians 
to honour those who profess themselves such: yet true it is; 
for derision and censure against piety seem at present to be the 
most dominant language of the world. I confess that the world 
ideally respects virtue; but it always despises those who make 
a profession of it; it acknowledges that nothing is more esti- 
mable than a solid and sincere piety; but it complains that such 
is nowhere to be found; and, by always separating virtue from 
those who practise it, it only makes a show of respecting the 
phantom of sanctity and righteousness, that it may be the bet- 
ter entitled to contemn and to censure the just. 

Now the first object, on which the ordinary discourses of 
the world fall against virtue, is the probity of the intentions of 
the just. As what is apparent in their actions gives little hold 
in general to malignity and censure, they confine themselves to 
the intentions: they pretend, and above all at present, when, 
under a prince equally great as religious, virtue, formerly a 
stranger and dreaded at court, is now become the surest path 
to favour and reward : they pretend, that it is there to which all 
who make a public profession of it, point their aim ; that their 
only wish is to accomplish their ends; and that those, who ap- 
pear the most sanctified and disinterested, are superior to the 
rest only in art and cunning; if they excuse them from the 
meanness of such a motive, they give them others equally un- 
worthy of the elevation of virtue and of Christian sincerity. 
Thus when a soul, touched for its errors, becomes contrite, it 
is not God, but the world, whom it seeks through a more cun- 
ning and concealed path; it is not grace which hath changed 
the heart, it is age which begins to efface its attractions, and to 
withdraw it from pleasures, only because pleasures begin to fly 
from it. If zeal attaches itself to works of piety, it is not that 
they are charitable, it is because they wish to become consequen- 
tial: If they shut themselves up in solitude and in prayer, it 
is not their piety which dreads the dangers of the world, it is 
their singularity and ostentation which wish to attract its suf- 
frages : Lastly, the merit of the most holy and the most virtuous 



Serm. XX.] TOWARDS THE GODLY. 



339 



actions is always disparaged in the mouth of the worldly, by the 
suspicions with which they endeavour to blacken the intentions. 

Now, in this temerity, I find three hateful characters, which 
expose the absurdity and the injustice of it: It is a temerity of 
indiscretion, seeing you judge, you decide upon what you know 
not: it is a temerity of corruption, seeing we generally suppose 
in others only what we feel in ourselves: Lastly, it is a temer- 
ity of contradiction, seeing you find unjust and foolish when 
directed against yourself, the very same suspicions which to you 
appear so well-founded against your brother. Lose not, I in- 
treat of you, the consequence of these truths. 

I say, 1st, a temerity of indiscretion. For, my brethren, to 
God alone is reserved the judgment of intentions and thoughts: 
He alone who sees the secresy of hearts can judge them; nor 
will they be manifested till that terrible day when his light 
shall shine through and dispel every darkness. An impene- 
trable veil is spread here below, over the depth of the human 
heart; we must then wait till that veil shall be rent, before the 
shameful passion which it conceals, as the apostle says, can be- 
come manifest, and before the mystery of iniquity, which work- 
eth in secret, can be revealed; till then, whatever passes in 
the heart of men, buried from our knowledge, is interdicted to 
the temerity of our judgments; even when what is visible in the 
conduct of our brethren appears unfavourable to them, charity 
obliges us to suppose that what we see not makes amends for 
and rectifies it; and it requires us to excuse the faults of the 
actions which offend us by the innocency of the intentions, which 
are concealed from our knowledge. Now, if religion ought to 
render us indulgent, and even favourable to their vices, will it 
suffer us to be cruel and inexorable to their virtues? 

Indeed, my brethren, what renders your temerity here more 
unjust, more black, and more cruel, is the nature of your sus- 
picions. For, were your suspicions of the pious to be directed 
only towards some of those weaknesses inseparable from human 
nature, — for instance, too much sensibility of injury, too much 
attention to their interests, too much inflexibility in their 
opinions, — we would be entitled to reply to you, as we shall 
afterwards tell you, that you exact from the virtuous an exemp- 
tion from error and a degree of perfection which exists not in 
life. But you rest not there : you attack their probity and in- 
tegrity of heart; you suspect them of atrocity, dissimulation, 
and hypocrisy; of making the most holy things subservient to 
their own views and passions; of being public impostors, of 
sporting with God and man; and all these through the osten- 
sible appearances of virtue. What, my brethren ! You would 
not dare, after the most notorious guilt, to pronounce such a 
sentence on a convicted criminal; you would rather consider 
his fault as one of those misfortunes which may happen to all 
men, and of which an evil moment may render us capable; 
and you decidedly give judgment against the virtuous; and you 



340 



INJUSTICE OF THE WORLD. [Sbrm. XX. 



suspect fci a pious character, from a holy and praiseworthy 
life, what you would not dare to suspect from the most scandalous 
and criminal conduct of a sinner ? And you consider as a witti- 
cism, when directed against the servants of God, what would 
appear to you as a barbarity when against a man stained with 
a thousand crimes. Is virtue then the only crime unworthy of 
indulgence; or is it sufficient, to serve Jesus Christ, to become 
unworthy of all respect ? Do the holy practices of piety, which 
surely ought rather to attract respect and estimation to your 
brother, become the only titles which confound him, in your 
mind, with the infamous and the wicked? 

I allow that the hypocrite deserves the execration of both God 
and man; that the abuse which he makes of religion is the 
greatest of crimes; that derisions and satires are too mild to 
decry a vice which deserves detestation and horror from the hu- 
man race; and that a profane theatre errs in throwing only 
ridicule upon a character so abominable, so shameful, and so 
afflicting to the church; for it ought to excite the tears and in- 
dignation rather than the laughter of believers. 

But I say, that this eternal inveteracy against virtue; that 
the rash suspicions which always confound the pious man with 
the hypocrite; that that malignity which, in making the most 
pompous eulogiums on righteousness, finds no character amongst 
the upright who is entitled to them; I say, that such language, 
of which so little scruple is made by the world, saps religion, 
and tends towards rendering all virtue suspicious: I say, that 
you thereby furnish arms to the impious in an age when too 
many other scandals countenance and authorize impiety. You 
assist in making them believe that none, truly pious, exist on 
the earth; that even the saints, who have formerly edified the 
church, and whose memory we so warmly cherish, have held 
out to men only a false spectacle of virtue, of which, in reality, 
they had only the phantom and the appearances; and that the 
gospel hath never formed but pharisees and hypocrites. Do 
you, my brethren, comprehend all the guilt of these foolish 
4erisions? You think that you are only deriding false virtue, 
and you are blaspheming religion. I repeat it; in mistrusting 
the sincerity of the just whom you see, the freethinker concludes 
that all who have preceded them, and whom we see not, were 
equally insincere; that the martyrs themselves, who met death 
with such fortitude, and who rendered to truth the most shin- 
ing and least suspicious testimony which can be given by man, 
were only madmen, who sought a human glory by a vain 
ostentation of courage and heroism; and lastly, that the vene- 
rable tradition of so many saints, who from age to age, have 
honoured and edified the church, is merely a tradition of kna- 
very and deceit. And would to God that this were only a 
transport of zeal and exaggeration? These blasphemies, which 
strike us with such horror, and which ought to have been buried 
with paganism, we have still the sorrow to hear repeated among 



Serm. XX.] TOWARDS THE GODLY. 



341 



us. And you, who shudder at them, unknowingly put them, 
however, into the mouth of the freethinker; it is your continual 
sarcasms and censures upon piety which have rendered, in our 
days, impiety so general and uncurbed. 

I do not add, that, by these means every thing in society be- 
comes dubious and uncertain. There is no longer, then, either 
good faith, integrity, or fidelity among men. For, if we must 
no longer depend on the sincerity and virtue of the just; if 
their piety be only a mask to their passions, we assuredly will 
not place any confidence in the probity of sinners and worldly 
characters: all men are consequently only cheats and villains, 
of whom too much care cannot be taken, and with whom we 
ought to live as with enemies; and these so much the more to 
be dreaded, as, under a treacherous outside of friendship and 
humanity, they conceal the design of either deceiving or ruin- 
ing us. None but a heart profoundly wicked and corrupted can 
suppose such iniquity and corruption in that of others. 

And behold the second character of that temerity of which 
we speak. Yes, my brethren, that fund of malignity, which sees 
guilt through the appearances evep of virtue, and attributes 
criminal intentions to works of holiness, can proceed only from 
a black and corrupted heart. As the passions have poisoned 
your heart, you whom this discourse regards, — -as you are ca- 
pable yourself of every duplicity and meanness; as you have no- 
thing in your own breast right, noble, or sincere, — you easily 
suspect your brethren to be what you are; you cannot persuade 
yourself that there still exist simple, sincere, and generous hearts 
on the earth; you think that you everywhere see what you feel 
in yourself; you cannot comprehend how honour, fidelity, sin- 
cerity, and so many other virtues, always false in your own 
heart, should have more reality in the hearts of persons, even 
the most respectable for their rank and character ; you resemble 
the courtiers of the king of the Ammonites: Having no other oc- 
cupation than that of being incessantly on the watch to supplant 
and lay snares for each other, they had little difficulty in believ- 
ing that David was not more upright in his intentions with re- 
gard to their master. You think, said they to that prince, that 
David means to honour the memory of your father, by sending 
comforters to you to condole with you on his death? They are 
not comforters, but spies, whom he sends to you: he is a villain, 
who, under the specious outside of an honourable and amicable 
embassy, seeks to discover the weaknesses of your kingdom, and 
to take measures to surprise you. Such is more especially the 
misfortune of courts: Bred up, and living in deceit, they see 
only dissimulation equally in virtue as in vice; as it is a stage 
upon which every one acts a borrowed character, they conclude 
that the pious man merely acts the personage of virtue; uncom- 
mon or unprofitable sincerity seems always impossible. 

A worthy heart, a heart upright, simple, and sincere, can 



342 INJUSTICE OF THE WORLD [Serm. XX. 



hardly comprehend that there are impostors on the earth; he 
finds within himself the apology of other men, and, hy what it 
would cost himself to be dishonest, he measures what it ought 
to cost others. Thus, my brethren, search into those who form 
these shameful and rash suspicions against the pious, and you 
will find that, in general, they are disorderly and corrupted 
characters, who seek to quiet themselves in their dissipations 
by the illusive supposition that their weaknesses are the weak- 
nesses of all men; that those who are apparently the most vir- 
tuous are superior to themselves only in the art of concealment; 
and that, were they narrowly examined, we should find them, 
in reality, made like other men : this idea is an iniquitous com- 
fort to them in their debaucheries. They harden themselves in 
iniquity, by thus associating with themselves in it all whom the 
credulity of the people calls virtuous: they form and endeavour 
to establish in themselves a shocking idea of the human race, in 
order to be less shocked with what they are forced to entertain 
of themselves, and they try to persuade themselves that virtue 
no longer exists, in order that vice may appear to them more 
excusable; as if, O my God! the multitude of criminals could 
disarm thy wrath, or deprive thy justice of the right to punish 
guilt. 

But, say you, one has seen so many hypocrites who have so 
long abused the world, whom it regarded as saints and the 
friends of God, and who, nevertheless, were only perverse and 
corrupted men. 

I confess it with sorrow, my brethren : but, from that, what 
would you wish to conclude? That all the virtuous are similar 
to them? The conclusion is detestable; and what would be- 
come of mankind, were you, in this manner, to reason on the 
rest of men? We have seen many wives faithless to their ho- 
nour and to their duty; but, do modesty and fidelity no longer 
exist in the sacred bond of marriage? Many magistrates have 
sold their honour and disgraced their function; but are justice 
and integrity consequently banished from every tribunal? His- 
tory hath preserved to us the remembrance of too many perfidi- 
ous, dissembling, unfaithful, and dishonourable princes, equally 
faithless to their subjects, their allies, and their enemies; but are 
integrity, truth, and religion, for ever excluded from a throne? 
The past ages have seen many subjects, distinguished for their 
names, their offices, and the gifts of their sovereign, betray their 
prince artd country, and keep up the most criminal intelligence 
with the enemy: would you find just the master whom you serve 
with so much zeal and courage, were he merely upon such grounds 
to suspect the truth of your fidelity? Why then is a suspicion, 
which excites the indignation of all other descriptions of men, 
only supportable when directed against the pious? Why is a con- 
clusion, so ridiculous in every other case, only judicious when 
against virtue? Doth the perfidy of a single Judas give you 



Serm. XX.] TOWARDS THE GODLY. 



343 



grounds to conclude that all the other disciples were traitors and 
without faith? Doth the hypocrisy of Simon the magician prove, 
that the conversion of the other disciples who embraced faith was 
merely an artifice to accomplish their own purposes ; and that, 
like him, they walked not uprightly in the path of the Lord? 
What can be more unjust or foolish, than of the guilt of an in- 
dividual to constitute a general crime? It is difficult, I confess, 
but that vice may sometimes assume the garb of virtue; that 
the angel of darkness may not sometimes have the appearance 
of an angel of light; and that the passions, which generally 
strain every nerve to succeed, may not sometimes call in the 
appearances of piety to their aid, particularly under a reign when 
piety, held in honour, is almost a certain road to fortune and 
favour. But it is the height of folly to reflect upon all virtue for 
the impious use which some individuals may make even of piety; 
and to believe that some abuses, discovered in a holy and vener- 
able profession, universally dishonour all who have embraced it. 
The truth, my brethren, is, that we hate all men who are not 
similar to ourselves; and that we are delighted to be enabled to 
condemn piety, because piety itself condemns us. 

But one has so often been deceived, say you. I confess it: 
but, in reply, I say, that, granting you are even deceived while 
refusing to suspect your brethren, and while rendering to a fic- 
titious virtue that esteem and honour which are due to real virtue 
alone: What would be the consequence? By what would your 
credulity be followed, either sorrowful or disgraceful? You 
would have judged according to the rules of charity, which doth 
not easily believe in evil, and which delighteth in even the ap- 
pearances of good; according to the rules of justice, which is 
incapable of every malignity or deed to others which it would 
not wish to have done to itself; according to the rules of pru- 
dence, which judges only from what is visible, and leaves to the 
Lord to judge of the intentions and thoughts; lastly, according 
to the rules of goodness and humanity, which always oblige us 
to presume in favour of our brethren. What would there be in 
such a mistake to alarm you ? How noble for the mind when the 
deception proceeds from a motive of humanity and kindness ! 
What honour do not such mistakes render to a good heart; for 
none but the virtuous and the sincere are capable of them; but 
you, alas ! not being such, prefer that deception which degrades 
the virtuous and pious man from that estimation which is his 
due, to hazarding the chance of not covering the hypocrite with 
the shame he deserves. 

But, besides, whence spring this zeal and inveteracy against 
the abuse, made by the hypocrite, of real virtue? Is the glory 
of God so warmly taken to heart by you* that you wish to avenge 
him on the impostors who dishonour him? What matters it to 
you, who neither serve nor love him, whether the Lord be served 
by a double or a sincere heart? What is there which can so 
strongly interest you for the integrity or the hypocrisy of his 



344 



INJUSTICE OF THE WORLD [Serm. XX. 



worshippers? You who know not how he is even worshipped? 
Ah! were he the God of your heart; did you love him as your 
Lord and Father; were his glory dear to you, we might then 
indeed pardon, as an excess of zeal, the holdness with which 
you rise up against the outrage done to God and his worship by 
the simulated piety of the hypocrite. The just, who love and 
serve him, are surely more entitled to cry out against an abuse 
so injurious to sincere piety; but you, who live like the pagans, 
who, sunk in debauchery, are without hope, and whose whole 
life is one continued guilt, ah? it belongs little to you to take 
the interest of God's glory against the fictitious piety which is 
the cause of so much disgrace and sorrow to the church; whe- 
ther he be faithfully served, or merely through grimace, is no 
affair of yours. Whence then comes a zeal so misplaced? 
Would you wish to know? It is not the Lord whom you wish 
to avenge, nor is it his glory which interests you; it is the good 
name of the pious which you wish to stain; it is not hyprocrisy 
which irritates your feelings, it is piety which displeases you; 
you are not the censurer of vice, you are only the enemy of vir- 
tue; in a word, you hate in the hyprocrite only the resemblance 
of the pious. 

In effect, did your censures proceed from a fund of religion 
and true zeal, ah ! with grief alone would you recal the history 
of these impostors, who have sometimes succeeded in deceiving 
the world. What do I say? Far from alleging to us, with an 
air of triumph, these examples, you would lament over the 
scandals with which they have afflicted the church; far from 
applauding yourselves, when you renew their remembrance, you 
would wish that such melancholy events were for ever effaced 
from the memory of men. The law cursed him who should 
dare to uncover the shame and turpitude of those who had given 
him life; but it is the shame and dishonour of the church, your 
mother, which you expose with such pleasure to public derision. 
Do you carefully recal certain humiliating circumstances to the 
house from which you spring, and which have formerly dis- 
graced the name and life of some one of your ancestors? Would 
you not wish for ever to efface these hateful vestiges of disgrace 
from the histories which hand them down to posterity? Do you 
not consider as enemies to your name those who ransack the 
past ages, in order to lay open these hateful particulars, and to 
revive them in the memory of men? Do you not in opposition 
to their malignity, loudly proclaim that maxim of equity, that 
faults are personal; and that it is unjust to attach the idea of 
dishonour to all who bear your name, merely because it has 
once been disgraced through the bad conduct of an individual? 

Apply the rule to yourself : the church is your house : the just 
alone are your relations, your brethren, your predecessors, your 
ancestors: they alone compose that family of first-born, to whom 
you ought to be eternally united. The wicked shall one day be 
as though they had never been: The ties of nature, of blood, 



Serm. XX.] TOWARDS THE GODLY. 



345 



and of society, which now unite you to them, shall perish; an 
immeasureable and an eternal chaos shall separate them from the 
children of God; they shall no longer be your brethren, your 
forefathers, or your relatives; they shall be cast out, forgotten, 
effaced from the land of the living, unnecessary to the designs 
of God, cut off for ever from his kingdom, and no longer, by 
any tie, holding to the society of the just, who shall then be 
your only brethren, your ancestors, your people, your tribe. 
What do you then, when you uncover, with such pleasure, the 
ignominy of some false just who dishonour their history? It is 
your house, your name, your relations, your ancestors, whom 
you dishonour: you come to stain the splendour of so many 
glorious actions, which, in all ages, have rendered their memo- 
ry immortal by the infidelity of an individual, who, bearing the 
name they bear, stain it by manners and a conduct totally dis- 
similar: upon yourselves then it is that you make the dishon- 
our fall; unless you have already renounced the society of the 
holy, and prefer to associate your eternal lot with that of the 
wicked and the unfaithful. 

But what is more particularly absurd in that temerity which 
is always so ready to judge and to blacken the intentions of the 
pious, is, that you thereby fall into the most ridiculous contra- 
diction with yourselves: last character of that temerity. 

Yes, my brethren, you accuse them of cunningly working to- 
wards their own point, of having their own views in the most 
holy actions, and of only acting the personage of virtue. But 
doth it become you, the inhabitants of a court, to make this re- 
proach? Your whole life is one continued disguise: you every- 
where act a part which is not your own : you flatter those whom 
you love not; you crouch to others whom you despise: you act 
the assiduous servant to those from whom you have emolument 
to expect, though, in your heart, you look up with envy to their 
rank, and think them unworthy of their elevation: in a word, 
your whole life is an assumed character. Your heart, on every 
occasion, belies your conduct; everywhere your countenance is 
in contradiction to your sentiments; you are the hypocrites of 
the world, of ambition, of favour, and of fortune; and it well 
becomes you, after that, to accuse the just of the same tricks, 
and so loudly to ring their dissimulation and pretended hypo- 
crisy: when you shall have nothing in the same way with 
which to reproach yourselves, then will we listen to the temer- 
ity of your censures; or rather, you shall have reason to be 
jealous for the glory of artifice and meanness, and to be dissatis- 
fied, that the pious should dare to interfere with a science which 
so justly belongs, and is so especially adapted to you. 

Besides, you so nervously clamour out against the world, 
when, too attentive to your actions, it maliciously interprets 
certain suspicious assiduities, certain animated looks; you so 
loudly proclaim then, that, if things go on thus, no person will 



346 



INJUSTICE OF THE WORLD [Serm. XX. 



in future be innocent; that no woman in the world will be con- 
sidered as a person of regular conduct; that nothing is more 
easy than to give an air of guilt to the most innocent things; 
that it will be necessary totally to banish one's self from society, 
and to deny one's self every intercourse with mankind; vou 
then so feelingly declaim against the malignity of men, who, on 
the most trivial grounds, accuse you of criminal intentions. 
But do the pious give juster foundation for the suspicions which 
you form against them? And, if it be permitted to you to hunt 
for guilt in them, though hidden under the appearances of vir- 
tue, why are you so enraged that the world should dare to sup- 
pose it in you, and should believe you criminal under the appear- 
ances of gTlilt? 

Lastly, O worldly women ! when we reproach you with your 
assiduity at theatres, and other places where innocence encoun- 
ters so many dangers, or the indecency and immodesty of your 
dress, you reply that you have no bad intentions; that you wish 
injury to none; you would wish indecent and criminal man- 
ners to be passed over, for the sake of a pretended innocency of 
intention, which your whole exterior belies; and you cannot 
pass over to the pious, virtuous, and laudable manners, for the 
sake of an integrity of heart, to which every thing external 
bears ample testimony. You exact that they shall suppose your 
intentions pure, when your works are not so; and you think 
yourselves entitled to believe that the intentions of the pious are 
not innocent, when all their actions are visibly so. Cease, then, 
either to justify your own vices, or to censure their virtues. 

It is thus, my brethren, that every thing poisons in our keep- 
ing, and that every thing removes us further from God: the spec- 
tacle even of virtue becomes to us a pretext for vice; and the 
examples themselves of piety are rocks to our innocence. It 
would seem, O my God, that the world doth not sufficiently 
furnish us with opportunities for our ruin: that the examples 
of sinners are not sufficient to authorize our errors; for we 
seek a support for them even in the virtues of the just. 

But you will tell us that the world is not so far wrong in 
censuring those who profess themselves people of piety: that 
such are every day seen, who, if possible, are more animated 
than other men in the pursuit of a worldly fortune, more eager 
after pleasures, more delicate in submitting to injury, more 
proud in elevation, and more attached to their own interests. 
This is the second injustice of the world towards the pious: not 
only does it maliciously interpret their intentions, which is a 
temerity, but it also scrutinizes their slightest imperfections, 
which is an inhumanity. 

Part II. It may truly be said that the world is a more rigid 
and severer critic upon the pious than the gospel itself; that it 
exacts a greater degree of perfection from them, and that their 



Serm. XX.] TOWARDS THE GODLY. 347 



weaknesses find less indulgence before the tribunal of men than 
they shall one day experience before the tribunal of God him- 
self. 

Now, I say that this attention to exaggerate the slightest 
errors of the pious, second injustice into which the world falls 
with regard to them, is an inhumanity, considering the weak- 
ness of man, the difficulty of virtue, and lastly, the maxims of 
the world itself. I entreat your attention here my brethren. 

Inhumanity, considering the weakness of man. Yes, my 
brethren, it is an illusion to suppose that there are perfect virtues 
among men; it is not the condition of this mortal life: almost 
every one bears with him in piety, his faidts, his humours, and 
his peculiar weaknesses; grace corrects, but does not overturn 
nature; the Spirit of God, which creates in us a new man, 
leaves still many remains of the old: conversion terminates our 
vices, but does not extinguish our passions; in a word, it forms 
the Christian within us, but it still leaves us men. The most 
righteous, consequently, still preserve many remains of the sin- 
ner: David, that model of penitence, still blended with his 
virtues a too great indulgence for his children, a secret pride at 
the number of his people and the prosperity of his reign; the 
mother of Zebedee's children, in spite of faith, through which 
she was so strongly attached to Jesus Christ, lost nothing of 
her anxiety for the elevation of her children, or of her concern 
towards procuring for them the first stations in an earthly king- 
dom; the apostles themselves disputed rank and precedency 
with each other; never shall we be divested of all these little 
weaknesses till we are delivered from this body of death, which 
is the fountain from which they spring. The most shining 
virtue here below always, therefore, hath its spots and its flaws, 
which are not to be too narrowly examined: and the just must 
always in some points resemble the rest of men. All, then, that 
can be exacted from human weakness is, that the virtues rise 
superior to the vices, the good to the evil; that the essential 
be regulated, and that we incessantly labour towards regulating 
the rest. 

And surely, my brethren, overflowing with passions, as we 
are in the wretched condition of this life; loaded with a body of 
sin, which oppresses the soul; slaves to our senses and to the 
flesh; bearing within us an eternal opposition to the law of God; 
the continual prey of a thousand desires which combat against 
our soul ; the everlasting sport of our inconstancv and the na- 
tural instability of our heart; finding nothing within us but 
what is repugnant to duty: eagerly pursuing whatever removes 
us from God; disgusted with every tiling which brings us nearer 
to him; loving only what tends to our ruin; hating only what 
tends to our salvation; weak in good; always ripe for evil; 
and, in a word, finding in virtue the rock of virtue itself, is it 
to be wondered at, that men, surrounded, filled with so many 



348 



INJUSTICE OF THE WORLD [Serm. XX. 



miseries, should sometimes allow some of them to be visible; 
that men, so corrupted, should not be always equally holy? 
And were you, in any measure, equitable, would you not rather 
find it worthy of admiration that some virtue still remained, 
than worthy of censure that they still preserve some vices? 

Besides, God hath his reasons for still leaving, to the most 
pious, certain sensible weaknesses which strike and olfend you. 
In the first place, He thereby wisheth to humble them, and to 
render their virtue more secure by concealing it even from them- 
selves. Secondly, He wisheth to animate their vigilance, for 
he leaveth not Amorites in the land of Canaan, that is to say, 
passions in the heart of his servants, but, lest, freed from all 
their enemies, they should lull themselves in idleness and in a 
dangerous security. Thirdly, He wisheth to excite in them a 
continual desire for the eternal land, and to render the exilement 
of this life more bitter, through a proper sense of those miseries 
from which they can never here below, obtain a complete de- 
liverance. Fourthly, perhaps not to discourage sinners by the 
sight of too perfect a virtue, which might probably induce them 
to cease every exertion, under the idea of never being able to 
attain it. Fifthly, In order to preserve to the just a coutinual 
subject of prayer and penitence, by leaving them a continual 
source of sin. Sixthly, To prevent those excessive honours 
which the world would render to virtue were it pure and spark- 
ling, and lest it should find its recompense, in other words its 
rock, in the vain applauses of men. What shall I lastly say; 
It perhaps is, still more to lull and to blindfold the enemies of 
piety; by the weaknesses of the pious to strengthen you, who 
listen to me, in the foolish opinion that there is no real virtue 
on the earth; to authorise you in your disorders, by the sup- 
position that they are similar to yourselves; and to render un- 
availing to you all the pious examples of the just. You triumph 
in the weaknesses of the pious; yet are their weaknesses per- 
haps punishments from God on you, and means employed by 
his justice to nourish your unjust prepossessions against virtue, 
and completely to harden you in guilt. God is terrible in his 
judgments; and the consummation of iniquity is, in general, the 
sequel of iniquity itself. 

But, 2dly, Were your censures on those weaknesses, which 
may still remain to the pious, not rendered barbarous and in- 
human, When the natural weakness of man is considered, the 
difficulty alone of virtue would amply render them so. 

For, candidly, my brethren, doth it appear so easy to you to 
live according to God, and to walk in the straight path of sal- 
vation, that you should become so implacable against the pious, 
from the moment that they err but for an instant? Is it so 
easy continually to renounce one's self, to be ever guarded 
against one's own heart, to overcome its antipathies, to repress 
its likings, to lower its pride, and to fix its inconstancy? Is it 



Serm. XX.] TOWARDS THE GODLY. 349 



so easy a matter to restrain the sallies of the mind, to moderate 
its judgments, to disavow its suspicions, to soften its keenness, 
and to smother its malignity? Is it so easy to be the eternal 
enemy of one's own body, to conquer its indolence, to mortify 
its tastes, and to crucify its desires? Is it so natural to pardon 
injuries, to bear with contempt, to love, and even to load with 
benefits those who do evil to us, to sacrifice one's fortune in order 
not to fail to his conscience, to deny one's self pleasures to which 
all our inclinations lead us, to resist example, and singly to 
maintain the cause of virtue against the multitude which con- 
demns it? Do all these appear, in fact, so easy to you, that you 
deem those, who for an instant depart from them, unworthy of 
the least indulgence? How feelingly do you expatiate everyday 
on the difficulties of a Christian life, when we propose to you 
these holy rules? Is it so very astonishing, that, in a long march 
through rough and dangerous ways, a man should sometimes 
stumble, or even fall, through fatigue and weakness? 

Inhuman that we are ! And, nevertheless, the slightest imper- 
fection in the pious destroys, in our mind, all their most esti- 
mable qualities: far from excusing their weaknesses, in con- 
sideration of their virtue, it is their virtue itself which renders 
us doubly cruel and inexorable to their weaknesses. To be just 
is sufficient, it would appear, to forfeit every claim to indul- 
gence: to their vices we are clear-sighted; to their virtues we 
are blind; a moment of weakness effaces from our remembrance 
a whole life of fidelity and innocence. 

But what renders your injustice towards the pious still more 
cruel, is, that it is your own examples, your irregularities, and 
even your censures, which stagger, weaken, and force them 
sometimes to imitate you; it is the corruption of your manners 
which becomes the continual and the most dangerous snare to 
their innocence; it is those foolish derisions with which you 
continually assault virtue, that force them reluctantly to shelter 
themselves under the appearances of guilt. And how can you 
suppose it possible that the piety of the most righteous should 
always preserve itself pure, in the midst of the present manners, 
m a perverse world, whose customs are abuses, and its commu- 
nications crimes; where the passions are the only bond of so- 
ciety, and where the wisest and most virtuous are those who 
retrench from guilt only its scandal and publicity? How can 
you suppose it possible, that, amidst these eternal derisions which 
ridicule the pious, which make them almost ashamed of virtue, 
and often oblige them to counterfeit vice; that in the midst of so 
many disorders, authorized by the public manners, by senseless 
applauses, by examples rendered respectable by rank and dig- 
nity, by the ridicule cast on these who dare to hesitate at them, 
and lastly, by the weakness even of their own heart; how do 
you think it possible that the pious should be always enabled to 
stem such a torrent, and that, obliged continually to fortify 



350 INJUSTICE OF THE WORLD. [Serm. XX. 



themselves against so rapid and so impetuous a course, which 
hurries away the rest of men. watchfulness and vigour should 
not sometimes fail them for an instant, and that thev should not 
sometimes feel a momentary influence of the fatal vortex? You 
are their seducers; and you pretend to be displeased because thev 
allow themselves to be seduced? No longer, therefore, reproach 
to them your scandals which weaken their faith, and which they 
shall one day reproach to you before the ti ibunaJ of Jesus Christ; 
and triumph no more over their weaknesses, which are vour 
own work, and for which they shall afterwards demand Ven- 
geance against you. 

I have also said, that even your maxims cannot be excused 
from severity and extravagance with respect to the pious. Judge 
from what I shall now repeat. You are continuallv saving that 
such an individual, with all his devotion, fails not, however, to 
prosecute his own designs; that another is very attentive in 
paying court to his superiors; again, that a third has a piety so 
delicate and sensible, that the merest trifle wounds and shocks 
it; that such an individual pardons nothing: that the other is 
not sorry to be thought still agreeable and amusing; that a 
third has a very commodious piety, and lives a verv easv and 
agreeable life; lastly, that another is full of caprice and fancies, 
and that none of her household can put up with her temper: 
such are your daily discourses; nor do your satires stop there, 
for you boldly decide from thence that a devotion, blended with 
so many faults, can never lead them to salvation: behold vour 
maxims. Yet, nevertheless, when we announce to vou, from 
this seat, that a worldly, idle, sensual, dissipated, and almost 
wholly profane life, such as you lead, can never be a way to sal- 
vation, you say that you cannot see any harm in it; vou accuse 
us of severity, and of exaggerating the rules and duties of vour 
station; you do not believe that more is required for salvation. 
But, my brethren, to which side here do severity and injustice 
belong? You condemn the pious, because to their piety thev 
add some particulars which resemble you; because they mingle 
some of your faults with an infinity of virtues and good works, 
which amply repay the errors; and you believe yourselves in 
the path of salvation, you who have only their faults, without 
even the piety which purifies them? O man! who then art 
thou that thus pretendest to save those whom the Lord con- 
demneth, and to condemn those whom he justifieth? 

Nor is this all; and you shall immediately see how little, on 
this point, you are consonant with yourselves. In effect, when 
the pious live in total retirement : when, no longer keeping any 
measures with the world, they conceal themselves from the eves 
of the public; when they resign certain places of emolument 
and distinction, and divest themselves of all their emplovments 
and dignities, for the sole purpose of attending to their salva- 
tion; when they lead a life of tears, prayer, mortification, and 



Seem.] XX. TOWARDS THE GODLY. 351 



silence, (and happily our age hath furnished such examples,) 
what have you then said? That they carried matters too far; 
that violent counsels had been given them; that their zeal was 
not according to knowledge; that, were all to imitate them, 
public duties would be neglected; that those services, encum- 
bent on every citizen to his country and state, would no longer 
be given; that such an extreme of singularity is not required; 
and that real devotion proves itself, by living together and ful- 
filling the duties of the station in which God hath placed us: 
such are your maxims. But, on the other hand, when the vir- 
tuous unite with piety the duties of their station and the inno- 
cent interests of their fortune; when they still keep up a certain 
degree of intercourse and society with the world, and show them- 
selves in places from which their rank does not allow them to 
banish themselves; when they still partake in certain public 
pleasures, which their station renders inevitable; in a word, 
when they are prudent in good, and simple in evil, ah! you 
then proclaim that they are made like other men; that it ap- 
pears very easy to you, at that price, to serve God; that you see 
nothing in their devotion to frighten you; and that if nothing 
more were required, you would soon be yourself a great saint. 
In vain may piety assume every appearance; it is sufficient that 
it is piety to displease and to merit your censures. Be consistent 
with yourselves; you would have the pious to resemble your- 
selves, yet you condemn them from the moment that you can 
trace a resemblance. 

The obstinacy and injustice of the Jews, in our gospel, are 
renewed in you. When John the Baptist appeared in the de- 
sert, clothed in goat's skins, neither eating nor drinking, and 
holding out to Judea an austerity of virtue which none of the 
preceding just or prophets had ever equalled, they considered, 
says Jesus Christ, the austerity of his manners as the illusion 
of a false spirit, which seduced and urged him on to these ex- 
cesses, merely that, in a worldly vanity, he might find the 
recompense of his penance. On the contrary, the Son of Man 
afterwards came, continues the Saviour, eating and drinking; 
exhibiting to them, in his conduct, the model of a virtue more 
consonant with human weakness, and serving as an example to 
all, by leading a simple and ordinary life which all may imitate : 
Is he more sheltered from their censures? Ah! they declaim 
against him, as being a man of pleasure and a lover of good 
cheer; and the bendings of his virtue are no longer, in their 
opinion, but a relaxation which stains and dishonours it. The 
most dissimilar virtues are successful only in attracting the same 
reproaches. Ah ! my brethren, how much to be pitied would 
the pious be, were they to be judged before the tribunal of men! 
But they know that that world, which sits in judgment on them, 
is itself already judged. 

And what in this severity, with which you condemn the 



352 INJUSTICE OF THE WORLD [Serm. XX. 



slightest imperfections of the pious, is more deplorable, is, that, 
if a notorious and infamous sinner, after a whole life of iniquity 
and crimes, but give, on the bed of death, some weak proof of 
repentance; if he but pronounce the name of that God whom 
he has never known, and has always blasphemed; if he at last 
consent, after many delays and repugnances, to receive the last 
offices of the church, which he formerly held in contempt; ah! 
you rank him among the saints; you maintain that he has died 
the death of a Christian; that he has attained to the state of 
repentance; and that he has in treated forgiveness and mercy 
from God; upon these grounds you hope every thing for his 
salvation, and you no longer entertain a doubt but that the Lord 
hath shown him mercy: Some reluctant marks of religion, which 
have been extorted from him, are sufficient, in your idea, to se- 
cure to him the kingdom of God, into which nothing defiled 
shall ever enter; are sufficient, I say, in spite of the excesses 
and abominations of his whole life ; and an entire life of virtue 
is not sufficient, in your opinion, to render it certain to a faith- 
ful soul, from the moment that he mingles the smallest infi- 
delity with his past conduct; you save the wicked on the most 
frivolous and equivocal appearances of piety, and you condemn 
the just on the slightest and most excusable proofs of humanity 
and weakness. 

I might add, my brethren, that, consulting only your own 
interests, the imperfections of the pious ought to find you more 
indulgent and favourable. 

For they alone, my brethren, spare you: they alone conceal 
your vices, smooth your faults, excuse your errors, and with 
pleasure dwell upon whatever may be praiseworthy in your 
virtue, while the world, your equals, your rivals, and your pre- 
tended friends, perhaps lessen your talents and services, speak 
with contempt of all your good qualities, ridicule your defects, 
number your misfortunes amongst your faults, exaggerate these 
very faults, and empoison your most innocent words and actions; 
the virtuous alone excuse you, justify your heart, and are the 
eulogists of your virtues, or the prudent dissemblers of your 
vices; they alone break up those conversations in which your re- 
putation is attacked; they alone refuse to join with the public 
against you; and, for them alone, you are destitute of humanity, 
and to them alone you cannot pardon even the virtues which ren- 
der them estimable. Ah! my brethren, return them at least what 
they lend to you; spare your protectors and apologists, and, by 
decrying them, do not debilitate the only favourable testimony 
which is left for you among men. 

But I speak too gently ; not only the pious refuse to join with 
the malignity of the public against you, but they alone are your 
true friends; they alone are touched with your misfortunes, af- 
fected by your wanderings, and interested in your salvation; they 
carry you in their heart; while excusing your passions and 



Seiim. XX.] TOWARDS THE GODLY. 



353 



irregularities before men, they silently lament over them before 
God; they raise up their hands for you to heaven; they sup- 
plicate your conversion; they intreat the forgiveness of your 
crimes; and you cannot bring yourselves to render justice even 
to their piety and innocence? Ah! they may make against you 
the same complaint to the Lord, that the prophet Jeremiah for- 
merly made against the Jews of his time, unjust censures of 
his piety and conduct: " Give heed to me, O Lord," said that 
man of God, 66 and hearken to the voice of them that contend 
with me. Shall evil be recompensed for good: for they have 
digged a pit for my soul; remember that I stood before thee to 
speak good for them, and to turn away thy wrath from them." 

You are surely sensible, my brethren, of all the injustice of 
your conduct with regard to what I have been mentioning; but 
what would it be, if, in completing what I had at first intended, I 
were to show you, that not only you give corrupted motives to the 
good works of the pious, which is a temerity; not only you ex- 
aggerate their slightest weaknesses, which is an inhumanity; 
but, likewise, when you have nothing to say against the probity 
of their intentions, and when their imperfections give no handle 
to your censures, that you fly to your last hold, that of casting 
an air of ridicule over their virtue itself; which is an impiety. 

Yes, my brethren, an impiety. You make a sport, a comic 
scene of religion; you still introduce it, like the pagans former- 
ly, on an infamous theatre: and there you expose its holy mys- 
teries, and all that is most sacred and most respectable on the 
earth, to the laughter of the spectators. You may apologize for 
your passions, through the weakness of temperament and human 
frailty; but your derisions of virtue can find no excuse but in 
the impious contempt of virtue itself; nevertheless, this irreli- 
gious and blasphemous mode of speaking is now regarded as a 
pleasantry, as a sally of wit, and as a language from which vanity 
appropriates to itself peculiar honour. 

But, my brethren, you thereby persecute virtue, and render it 
useless to yourselves; you dishonour virtue, and render it use- 
less to others; you try virtue, and render it insupportable to it- 
self. 

You persecute virtue, and render it useless to yourselves. Yes 
my dear hearer, the example of the pious was a mean of salvation 
provided for you by the goodness of God; now, his justice, in- 
censed at your derisions on his mercies to his servants, for ever 
withdraws th em from you, and punishes your contempt of piety, 
by denying to you the gift of piety itself. The kings of the 
earth take signal vengeance on those who dare to injure their 
statutes, for these are to be considered as public and sacred monu- 
ments representing themselves. But the just, here below, are 
the living statutes of the great King, the real images of a holy 
God; in them he hath expressed the majesty of his purest and 
most resplendent features; and he for ever curseth those sacrile- 

z 



354 



INJUSTICE OF THE WORLD [Serm. XX. 



gious and corrupted hearts who dare to make them a subject of 
derision and insult. 

Besides, even granting that the Lord should not deny to you 
the gift of piety in punishment of your derisions, they still form 
an invincible human barrier which will for ever exclude you 
from its cause. For I demand; if, when tired of the world, of 
your disorders, of yourself, you wish to return to God, and to 
save that soul which you now labour to destroy, how shall you 
dare to declare for piety, you who have so often made it the butt 
of your public and profane pleasantries ! How shall you ever 
boast of the duties of religion, you who are every day heard to 
say, that, to become devout, is, in other words, to say that the 
senses are lost; that such an individual had a thousand good 
qualities which rendered his society agreeable to all; but that 
devotion has now altered him to such a degree, that he is fully 
as insupportable as he was formerly pleasing; that he affects to 
make himself ridiculous: that we must renounce common sense 
before we can erect, it would appear, the standard of piety; that, 
may God preserve you from such madness; that you endeavour 
to be an honest man, but, God be praised, you are no devotee. 
What language ! That is to say, that God be praised you are 
already marked with the stamp of the reprobate: that with con- 
fidence you can say to yourself: " I shall never alter, but shall 
die exactly such as I am." What impiety! and yet it is among 
Christians that such discourses are every day ostentatiously, and 
with apparent satisfaction, repeated. 

Ah! my brethren, permit my sorrow to vent itself herein one 
reflection. The patriarchs, those men so venerable, so powerful, 
even according to the world, never had communication with 
the kings and nations of the different countries, where they were 
conducted by the order of the Lord But in the following re- 
ligious terms: " I fear the Lord." They claimed no respect 
from the grandeur of their race, whose origin was almost coeval 
with the world itself, from the lustre of their ancestors, from 
the splendour of the blood of Abraham, that man, the conqueror 
of kings, the model of all the sages of the earth, and the only 
hero of whom the world could then boast. " We fear the Lord." 
Behold their most pompous title, their most august nobility, 
the only character by which they wished to be distinguished 
from other men; such was the magnificent sign which appeared 
at the head of their tents and flocks, which shone on their stand- 
ards, and every where bore with them the glory of their name, 
and that of the God of their fathers. And we, my brethren, 
we shun the reputation of a man just and fearing God, as a title 
of reproach and shame; we pompously dwell upon the vain dis- 
tinctions of rank and birth; wherever we go, the frivolous mark 
of our names and dignities precedes and announces us; and we 
hide the glorious sign of the God of our fathers; we even glori- 
fy ourselves, in not being among the number of those who fear 



Serm. XX.] TOWARDS THE GODLY. 355 



and adore him. O God! leave then to these foolish men a 
glory so hideous; confound their folly and impiety, hy permit- 
ting them to the end to glorify themselves in their confusion and 
ignominy. 

Nor is this all. By these deplorable derisions not only do you 
render virtue useless to yourselves but you likewise render it 
odious and useless to others; that is to say, not only do you bar 
against yourselves every path which leads to God, but you like- 
wise shut it against an infinity of souls, whom grace still urges 
in secret to relinquish their crimes, and to live in a Christian 
manner; who dare not declare themselves, lest they should be 
exposed to the lash of your satire and profane railleries; who, 
in a new life, dread only the ridicule which you cast upon vir- 
tue; who, in secret, oppose only that single obstacle to the voice 
of Heaven which calls upon them; and trembling hesitate, in 
the grand affair of eternity, betwixt the judgments of God and 
your senseless and impious derisions. 

That is to say, that you thereby blast the fruit of that gospel 
which we announce, and render our ministry unavailing; you 
deprive religion of its terrors and majesty, and spread through the 
whole exterior of piety a ridicule which falls upon religion itself. 
You perpetuate in the world, and support among men, those pre- 
judices against virtue, and that universal illusion employed by 
Satan to deceive them, which is that of treating piety as perverse 
and a folly; you authorise the blasphemies of freethinkers and of 
the wicked: you accustom sinners to arrogate to themselves an 
ostentatious glory from vice and irregularity, and to consider 
debauchery as fashionable and genteel when contrasted with the 
ridicule of virtue. What, indeed, may I not say? Through your 
means piety becomes the fable of the world, the sport of the 
wicked, the shame of sinners, the scandal of the weak, and the 
rock even of the just ; through you vice is held in honour, virtue 
is debased, truth is weakened, faith is extinguished, religion is 
annihilated, and corruption universally spreads; and, as foretold 
by the prophet, desolation perseveres even to the consummation 
and to the end. 

Let me likewise add, that, through you, virtue becomes in- 
supportable to itself: your derisions become a rock to the piety 
even of the just: you shake their faith; you discourage their 
zeal': you suspend their good desires; you stifle in their hearts 
the liveliest impressions of grace; you stop them in a thousand 
deeds of fervour and virtue, which they dare not expose to the 
impiety of your censures; in spite of themselves, you force them 
to conform to your habits and maxims, which they detest, to 
abate from their retirement, their mortifications, and their 
prayers; and to consecrate to these duties only those concealed 
moments which may escape your knowledge and railleries; 
through these means, you deprive the church of their edifying 
example; you deprive the weak of those succours which they 



356 



INJUSTICE OF THE WORLD [Serm. XX. 



would otherwise find there; sinners of that shame with which 
their presence would cover them; the just of that consolation 
which would animate them; and religion of a sight which would 
do it honour. 

Alas! my brethren, in former ages tyrants never derided 
Christians, but in reproaching to them their pretended super- 
stitions: they ridiculed the public honours which they saw them 
render to Jesus Christ, a person crucified, and the preference 
which was given to him by Christians over Jupiter and all the 
gods of the empire, whose worship was become respectable 
through the pomp and magnificence of their temples and altars, 
the antiquity of the laws, and the majesty of the Cesars: but, 
on the other hand, they bestowed loud and public praises on 
their manners; they admired their modesty, frugality, charity, 
patience, innocent and mortified life, and their absence from 
theatres, or every other place of public amusement; they could 
not without veneration, regard the wise, retired, modest, hum- 
ble, and benevolent manners of those simple and faithful be- 
lievers. You, on the contrary, more senseless, find no fault 
with them for adoring Jesus Christ, and for placing their con- 
fidence and hope of salvation in the mystery of the cross; but 
you find it ridiculous that they should deny themselves every 
public pleasure; that they should live in the practice of retire- 
ment, mortification, and prayer; but you find them worthy of 
your derision and censure, because they are humble, simple, 
chaste, and modest: and the Christian life, which found ad- 
mirers and panegyrists even among tyrants, experiences from 
you only mockery and profane raileries. 

What folly, my brethren ! to find worthy of laugliter in the 
world, which is itself but a mass of trifles and absurdities, only 
those who know its frivolity, and whose only thoughts are bent 
on placing themselves secure from the wrath to come ! What folly, 
to despise in men the very qualities which render them displeas- 
ing to God, respectable to angels, and useful to their fellow- 
creatures? What folly, to be convinced that an eternal happi- 
ness or misery awaits us, yet to find ridiculous only those who 
are interested in so important an affair ! 

Let us hold virtue in respect, my brethren; it alone, on the 
earth, merits our admiration and praise. If we find ourselves 
still too weak to fulfil its duties, let us at least be equitable, and 
esteem its lustre and innocence; if we cannot live the life of the 
just, let us wish to attain it, let us envy their lot; if we cannot 
as yet imitate their example, let us consider every derision on 
virtue not only as a blasphemy against the holy Spirit, but as 
an outrage on humanity, which virtue alone honours and digni- 
fies; far from reproaching the Godly with those virtues which 
render them dissimilar to us, let us reproach ourselves with the 
vices which prevent us from resembling them; in a word, let 



Serm. XXI.] RESPECT IN THE TEMPLES, &c. 357 



us, by a true and sincere respect for piety, deserve to obtain one 
day the gift of piety itself. 

And you, my brethren, who serve the Lord, remember, that 
the interests of virtue are in your hands; that the weaknesses, 
the stains with which you blend it, become, as I may say, stains 
on religion itself; consider how much the world expects from 
you, and what engagements you contract towards the public, 
when you espouse the cause of piety; consider with what dig- 
nity, what fidelity, what respectability you ought to support 
the character and personage of a servant of Jesus Christ. Yes, 
my brethren, let us, with majesty, support the interests of piety 
against the sneers of those who despise it; let us purchase the 
right of being insensible to their censures by giving no found- 
ation for them; let us force the world to respect what it cannot 
love; let us not of the holy profession of piety make a sordid 
gain, a vile worldly interest, a life of ill nature and caprice, a 
claim to effeminacy and idleness, a singularity from which we 
arrogate honour, a prejudice, a spirit of intolerance which flat- 
ters us, and a spirit of division which separates us from our fel- 
low-creatures; let us make it the price of eternity, the path to 
heaven, the rule of our duties, and the reparation of our crimes; 
a spirit of modesty which makes us unassuming, a compunction 
which humbles us, a gentleness which draws us to our brethren, 
a charity which makes us bear with them, an indulgence 
which attracts their regard, a spirit of peace which ties us to 
them; and lastly, a union of hearts, of desires, of affections, of 
good and evil on the earth, which shall be the forerunner and 
hope of that eternal union which charity is to consummate in 
heaven. 



SERMON XXI. 

RESPECT IN THE TEMPLES OF GOD. 

Matthew, xxi. 12. 

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold 
and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money- 
changers, and the seats of them that sold doves. 

Whence comes this aspect of zeal and of indignation which 
Jesus Christ, on this occasion, allows his countenance to betray? 
Is this then that King of Peace who was to appear in Sion armed 
with his meekness alone? We have seen him sitting as Judge 
over an adultress, and he hath not even condemned her. We 



358 



RESPECT IN THE 



[Serm. XXI. 



have seen at his feet the prostitute of the city, and he hath gra- 
ciously forgiven her debaucheries and scandals. His disciples 
wanted the fire of heaven .to descend upon an ungrateful and 
perverse city; but he reproached them with being still unac- 
quainted with that new spirit of mercy and of charity which he 
came to spread throughout the earth. He hath just been la- 
menting with tears the miseries which threaten Jerusalem, that 
criminal city, the murderer of the prophets, which is on the 
eve of sealing the sentence of her reprobation by the iniquitous 
death she is so soon to inflict on him whom God had sent to be 
her Redeemer. On every occasion he hath appeared feeling 
and merciful; and, in consequence of the excess of his meekness, 
he hath been called the friend even of publicans and sinners. 

What then are the outrages, which now triumph over all his 
clemency, and arm his gracious hands with the rod of justice 
and of wrath; The holy temple is profaned; his Father's house 
is dishonoured; the place of prayer, and the sacred asylum of 
the penitent, is turned into a house of traffic and of avarice : 
this is what calls the lightning into those eyes which would 
wish to cast only looks of compassion upon sinners. Behold 
what obliges him to terminate a ministry of love and of recon- 
ciliation, by a step of severity and of wrath similar to that with 
which he had opened it. For remark, that what Jesus Christ 
doth here, in terminating his career, he had already done, when 
after thirty-three years of private life, he entered for the first 
time into Jerusalem, there to open his mission, and to do the 
work of his Father. It might be said that he had himself for- 
gotten that spirit of meekness and of long-suffering which was 
to distinguish his ministry from that of the ancient covenant, 
and under which he was announced by the prophets. 

Many other scandals, besides those seen in the temple, doubt- 
less took place in that city, and were perhaps no less worthy of 
the zeal and the chastisement of the Saviour; but, as if his Fa- 
ther's glory had been less wounded by them, he can conceal 
them for a time, and delay their punishment. He burst not 
forth at once against the hypocrisy of the pharisees, and the 
corruption of the scribes and priests; but the chastisement of 
the profaners of the temple can admit of no delay; his zeal on 
this occasion admits of no bounds; and scarcely is he entered 
into Jerusalem when he flies to the holy place, to avenge the 
honour of his Father there insulted, and the glory of his house 
which they dishonour. 

Of all crimes, in effect, by which the greatness of God is in- 
sulted, I see almost none more deserving of his chastisements 
than the profanations of his temples; and they are so much the 
more criminal, as the dispositions required of us by religion, 
when assisting there, ought to be more holy, 

For, my brethren, since our temples are a new heaven, where 
God dwelleth with men, they require the same dispoitions of 



Serm. XXL] TEMPLES OF GOD. 



359 



us as those of the blessed in the heavenly temple; that is to 
say, that the earthly altar, being the same as that of heaven, 
and the Lamb, who offers himself and is sacrificed there, being 
the same, the dispositions of those around him ought to be alike. 
Now, the first disposition of the blessed before the throne of 
God and the altar of the Lamb, is a disposition of purity and 
innocence. The second, a disposition of religion and internal 
humiliation. Thirdly, and lastly, a disposition even of decency 
and of modesty in dress. Three dispositions which comprise all 
the feelings of faith with which we ought to enter the temples 
of God; a disposition. of purity and innocence; a disposition of 
adoration and internal humiliation; a disposition even of exter- 
nal decency and modesty in dress. 

Part I. The whole universe is a temple which God filleth 
with his glory and with his presence. Wherever we go, says 
the apostle, he is always beside us; in him we live, move, and 
have our being. If we mount up to the heavens, he is there; 
if we plunge to the centre there shall we find him; if we tra- 
verse the ocean on the wings of the winds, it is his hand that 
guides us: and he is alike the God of the distant isles, which 
know him not, as of the kingdoms and regions which invoke 
his name. 

Nevertheless, in all times, men have consecrated places to 
him which he hath honoured with a special presence. The pa- 
triarchs erected altars to him on certain spots where he had 
appeared. The Israelites, in the desert, considered the taber- 
nacle as the place in which his glory and his presence conti- 
nually resided; and, come afterwards to Jerusalem, they no 
more invoked him with the solemnity of incense and of victims 
but in that august temple erected to him by Solomon. It was 
the first temple consecrated by men to the true God. It was 
the most holy place in the universe; the only one where it was 
permitted to offer up gifts and sacrifices to the Lord^ From 
all quarters of the earth the Israelites were obliged to come 
there to worship him; captives in foreign kingdoms, their eyes, 
their wishes, and their homages were incessantly bent toward 
that holy place; in the midst of Babylon, Jerusalem and her 
temple were always the source of their delight, of their regrets, 
and the object of their worship and of their prayers; and Daniel 
chose to expose himself to all the fury of the lions, rather than 
to fail in that pious duty, and to deprive himself of that con- 
solation. Jerusalem indeed had often seen infidel princes, at- 
tracted by the sanctity and the fame of her temple, coming to 
render homage to a God whom they know not; and Alexander 
himself, struck with the majesty of that place, and with the 
august gravity of its venerable pontiff, remembered that he was 
man, and bowed his proud head before the God of hosts whom 
they there worshipped. 



360 



RESPECT DN THE ISerm. XXI. 



At the birth of the gospel, the houses of believers were at first 
domestic churches. The cruelty of tyrants obliged those first 
disciples of faith to seek obscure and hidden places to conceal 
themselves from the rage of the persecutions, there to celebrate 
the holy mysteries, and to invoke the name of the Lord. The 
majesty of the ceremonies entered into the church only with 
that of the Caesars : Religion had its Davids and its Solomons, 
who blushed to inhabit superb palaces, while the Lord had not 
whereon to lay his head: sumptuous edifices gradually rose up 
in our cities: the God of heaven and of the earth again, if I dare 
to say so, resumed his rights: and the temples themselves, 
where the demon had so lon^ been invoked, were restored to 
him as to their rightful master, consecrated to his worship and 
became his dwelling-place. 

But here they are no more empty temples like that of Jeru- 
salem, where every thing took place figuratively. The Lord 
still dwelt in the heavens, said the prophet, and his throne was 
still above the clouds; but since he hath deigned to appear upon 
the earth, to hold converse with men, and to leave us, in the 
mystical benedictions, the real pledge of his body and of his 
blood, actually contained under these sacred signs, the heavenly 
altar hath no longer any advantage over ours; the victim which 
we there immolate is the Lamb of God; the bread in which we 
participate is the immortal food of the angels and blessed spirits ; 
the mystical wine we there drink is that new beverage with 
which they make glad in the kingdom of the heavenly Father: 
the sacred canticle we there sing is that which the celestial har- 
mony makes continually to resound around the throne of the 
Lamb ; lastly, our temples are those new dwellings promised by 
the prophet to men. TTe see not fully there, it is troe, all that 
is seen in the heavenly Jerusalem, for here below we see only 
mystically, and, as it were, through a veil; but we possess him, 
we enjoy him, and heaven hath no longer any advantage over 
the earth. 

Now, I say. that our temples being a new heaven, filled with 
the glory and the presence of the Lord, innocence and purity 
are the first disposition by which we are entitled, like the blessed 
in the eternal temple, to appear there : for the God before whom 
we appear is a holy God. 

In effect, my brethren, the sanctity of God. spread through- 
out the universe, is one of the greatest motives held out by re- 
ligion to induce us everywhere to walk before him in purity 
and in innocence. As all creatures are sanctified by the inti- 
mate residence of the chvinitv who dwelleth in them, and all 
places are full of his glorv and immensity, the divine writings 
incessantly warn us everywhere to respect the presence of God 
who seeth and who watcheth us: on no occasion to offer any 
thing to his eyes which may wound the sanctity of his regards; 
and not to sully with our crimes that earth which wholly is his 



S&rm. XXL] TEMPLES OF GOD. 



361 



temple and the dwelling-place of his glory. The sinner, who 
bears an impure conscience, is therefore a kind of profaner, un- 
worthy of living upon the earth; for, by the sole situation of 
his corrupted heart, he everywhere dishonours the presence of 
the holy God who is ever beside him, and he profanes every spot 
where he bears his crimes, for all places are sanctified through 
the immensity of the God who filleth and consecrateth them. 

But, if the universal presence of God be a reason why we 
should everywhere appear pure and without stain to his eyes, 
doubtless those places which, in that universe, are particularly 
consecrated to him, our temples, in which the divinity, as I 
may say, corporeally resides, much more require that we should 
appear in them pure and without stain, lest the sanctity of the 
God who filleth and dwelleth in them be dishonoured. 

Thus, when the Lord had permitted Solomon to erect, to his 
glory, that temple so famed for its magnificence, and so venera- 
ble through the splendour of its worship and the majesty of its 
ceremonies, what rigid precautions did he not take, lest men 
should abuse his goodness in choosing a special dwelling-place 
amid them, and lest they should dare to appear there, in his 
presence, covered with stains and defilements ! What barriers 
did he not place betwixt himself, as I may say, and man; and, 
in drawing near to us, what an interval did not his holiness 
leave betwixt the spot filled with his presence, and the eyes of 
the people who came to invoke him! 

Yes, my brethren, take a description of it. Within the circle 
of that vast edifice which Solomon consecrated to the majesty 
of the God of his fathers, the Lord chose, for the place of his 
abode, only the most retired and the most inaccessible spot; 
that was the holy of holies, that is to say, the sole spot of that 
immense temple which was regarded as the dwelling-place 
and the temple of the Lord upon earth. And, besides, what 
terrible precautions defended its entry ! An outer and far dis- 
tant wall surrounded it; and there, the gentiles and foreigners, 
who wished to be instructed in the law, could only approach. 
Secondly, Another wall very distant concealed it; and there 
the Israelites alone were entitled to enter: yet was it neces- 
sary that they should be free from stain, and that they had care- 
fully purified themselves, through stated fastings and ablutions, 
before they should dare to approach a place still so distant from 
the holy of holies. Thirdly, Another wall more advanced still 
separated it from the rest of the temple; and there the priests 
alone entered every day to offer sacrifices, and to renew the sacred 
loaves exposed upon the altar. The law required that every other 
Israelite who should dare to approach it should be stoned as a 
sacrilegious profaner: and even a king of Israel, who thought 
himself entitled, through his regal dignity, to come there to offer 
up incense, was instantly covered with leprosy, degraded from 
his royalty, and excluded for the rest of his life from all society 



362 



RESPECT IN THE 



[Serm. XXI. 



and commerce with men. Lastly, After so many barriers and 
separations, appeared the holy of holies; that place, so terrible 
and so concealed, covered with an impenetrable veil, inacces- 
sible to every mortal, to every righteous, to every prophet, even 
to every minister of the Lord, the sovereign pontiff alone excep- 
ted; and even he was entitled to appear there only once in the 
year, after a thousand strict and religious precautions, and bear- 
ing in his hands the blood of the victim for which alone the 
gates of that sacred place were opened. 

Yet, after all, what did that holy of holies, that spot so for- 
midable and so inaccessible, contain? The tables of the law, the 
manna, the rod of Aaron; empty figures, and the shadows of fu- 
turity: The holy God himself, who sometimes gave out from 
thence his oracles, yet dwelt not there as in the sanctuary of 
Christians, the gates of which are indiscriminately opened to 
every believer. 

Now, my brethren, if the goodness of God, in a law of love 
and grace, hath no longer placed these terrible barriers betwixt 
him and us, if he hath destroyed that wall of separation which 
removed him so far from man, and hath permitted to every be- 
liever to approach the holy of holies, where he himself now 
dwelleth, it is not that his sanctity exacts less purity and inno- 
cence of those who come to present themselves before him. 
His design hath only been to render us more pure, more holy, 
and more faithful, and to make us feel what ought to be the 
sanctity of a Christian; seeing he is every day obliged to sup- 
port, at the foot of the altar, and of the terrible sanctuary, the 
presence of the God whom he invokes and whom he worships. 

And for this reason it is that Peter calls all Christians a 
holy nation; for they are all equally entitled to present them- 
selves before the holy altar: a chosen generation; for they are 
all separated from the world and from every profane custom, 
consecrated to the Lord, and solely destined to his worship and 
to his service: and, lastly, a royal priesthood; for they all par- 
ticipate, in one sense, in the priesthood of his Son, the High 
Priest of the new law, and because the privilege of entering in- 
to the holy of holies, formerly granted to the sovereign pontiff 
alone, is become the common and daily right of every believer. 

It is solely through the sanctity, then, of our baptism and of our 
consecration, that these sacred gates are opened to us. If im- 
pure, we, in some respect, forfeit this right; we have no longer 
a part in the altar: we are no longer worthy of the assembly 
of the holy, and the temple of God is no longer for us. 

Our temples, my brethren, ought therefore to be the house 
of the righteous alone. Every thing that takes place there 
supposes righteousness and sanctity in the spectators; the mys- 
teries which we there celebrate are holy and awful mysteries, 
and which require pure eyes; the victim we there offer up is 
the reconciliation of the penitent, or the bread of the strong 



Serm. XXI. 



TEMPLES OF GOD. 



363 



and perfect; the sacred anthems heard there are the groanings 
of a contrite heart, or the sighs of a chaste and believing soul. 
And on this account it is that the church takes care to purify 
even every thing that is to appear on the altar: she consecrates 
with prayers even the stones of these holy buildings, as if to 
render them worthy of sustaining the presence and the looks of 
the God who dwelleth in them : she exposes at the doors of our 
temples a water sanctified by prayers, and recommends to be- 
lievers to sprinkle it over their heads before they enter into the 
holy place, as if to complete their purification from any slight 
stains which might still remain; lest the sanctity of the God 
before whom they come to appear should be injured by them. 

Formerly, the church permitted not, within the circle of " her 
sacred walls, even tombs to the bodies of believers: she received 
not into that holy spot the spoils of their mortality: she did not 
believe that the temple of God, that new heaven filled with his 
presence and glory, should serve as an asylum to the ashes of 
those whom she numbered not as yet among the blessed. 
s The public penitents themselves were for a long time exclud- 
ed from assisting at the holy mysteries. Prostrated at the doors 
of the temple, covered with hair-cloth and ashes, even the as- 
sembly of believers was denied to them equally as to the ana- 
thematized: their tears and their mortifications alone could at 
length open to them these sacred gates. And what delight, 
when, after having groaned for, and supplicated their recon- 
ciliation, they found themselves in the temple among their breth- 
ren; they once more beheld those altars, that sanctuary, those 
ministers so deeply engaged at the awful mysteries; they heard 
their names pronounced at the altar with those of the believers, 
and sung with them hymns and holy songs ! What tears of rap- 
ture and of religion were then not shed! What regret for having 
so long deprived themselves of so sweet a consolation ! A single 
day, O my God, passed in thy holy house, cried they, no doubt, 
with the prophet, is more consoling to the heart than whole 
years spent in pleasure and in the tents of the wicked ! Such 
were formerly the temples of Christians. Far from these sacred 
walls, said then the minister with a loud voice to all the assem- 
bly of believers, far from these sacred walls be the unclean, the 
impure, the worshippers of idols, and whosoever loveth or 
maketh a lie. 

The church, it is true, no longer makes this rigorous discri- 
mination. The multitude of believers, and the depravation of 
manners, having rendered it impossible, she opens the gates of 
our temples indifferently to the righteous and to sinners; she 
draws the veil of her sanctuary in presence even of the profane; 
and, in order to begin the awful mysteries, her ministers no 
longer wait the departure of the sinful and unclean. But the 
church supposes that, if you be not righteous in coming here to 
appear before the majesty of a God so holy, you bring with you 



364 



RESPECT IN THE [Serm. XXI. 



at least desires of righteousness and of penitence: she supposes, 
that, if not yet altogether purified from your crimes, you at 
least feel contrition for them; that you come to lament them at 
the foot of the altar; and that your confusion and the sincere 
regret of your faults are now to begin here your justification 
and your innocence. 

If sinners, it is your desires towards a more Christian life 
which alone can authorize your appearing in this holy place; 
and, if you come not here to lament over your crimes, but 
bring with you, even to the foot of the altar, the will, and the 
actual and rooted affection for them, the church, it is true, 
who sees not, nor judges the heart, excludes you not from 
these sacred walls; but God invisibly rejecteth you. In his 
eyes you are accursed and excommunicated, and have no right 
in the altar or in the sacrifices; you are one who comes to stain, 
by your sole presence, the sanctity of your awful mysteries, to 
seat yourself in a place where you have no right to be seated, 
and from whence the angel of the Lord, who watches at the 
gate of the temple, invisibly chases you, as he formerly chased 
the first sinner, from that place of innocence and of sanctity, 
which the Lord sanctified with his presence. 

And, in effect, to feel guilty of the most shameful crimes, and 
to come to appear here in the most holy place of the earth; to 
come to appear before God, without being at least touched with 
shame and sorrow, without thinking at least upon the means of 
quitting so deplorable a situation, without at least wishing it, 
and forming some sentiments of religion; to bring even to the 
foot of the altar defiled bodies and souls; to force the eyes even 
of God, as I may say, to familiarize themselves with guilt, 
without at least confessing to him the sorrow of thus appear- 
ing before him covered with shame and reproach, and say- 
ing to him, like Peter, " Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a 
sinful man;" or, like the prophet, " Hide thy face from my 
sins, and blot out all mine iniquities," that I may be worthy of 
appearing here in thy presence, — is to profane the temple of God, 
to insult his glory and majesty, and the sanctity of his mys- 
teries. 

For, my dear hearer, be whom ye may who come to assist 
here, you come to offer up spiritually with the priest the awful 
sacrifice : you come to present to God the blood of his son, as 
the propitiation for your sins: you tome to appease his justice, 
through the dignity and the excellence of these holy offerings; 
and to represent to him the claim which you have upon his 
mercies, ever since the blood of his Son hath purified you; and 
that you no longer form, in one sense, with him, but one same 
priest and one same victim. Now, when you appear with a 
hardened and corrupted heart, without any sentiment of faith, 
or any desire of amendment, you disavow the ministry of the 
priest who offers in your stead: you disavow the prayers he 



Serm. XXL] TEMPLES OF GOD. 



365 



sends up to the Lord, in which, through the mouth of the 
priest, you intreat him to cast his propitious looks on these holy 
offerings which are upon the altar, and to accept of them as the 
price of the abolition of your crimes: you even insult the love 
of Jesus Christ himself, who renews the grand object of your 
redemption, and who presents you to his Father as a portion of 
that pure and spotless church which he hath washed in his 
blood: you insult the piety of the church, who, believing you 
united in her faith and in her charity, places in your mouth, 
through the hymns which accompany the holy mysteries, sen- 
timents of religion, of sorrow, and of penitence. Lastly, You 
deceive the faith and the piety of the righteous there present, 
and who, considering you as forming with them only one heart, 
one mind, and one same sacrifice, join themselves with you, and 
offer to the Lord your faith, your desires, your prayers, as their 
own. You are there, then, as an anathematized, separated from 
all the rest of your brethren: an impostor, who secretly disa- 
vows what you are publicly professing, and who comes to insult 
religion, and to reject all share in the redemption and in the 
sacrifice of Jesus Christ, in the very moment that he is renewing 
the memory, and offering up the price of it to his Father. 

What are we thence to conclude? That, if a sinner, we are 
to banish ourselves from our temples, and from the holy mys- 
teries? God forbid. Ah ! then it is that we ought to come to 
this holy place in search of our deliverance; then it is that we 
ought to come to solicit, at the foot of the altar, the tender mer- 
cies of the Lord, ever ready in that place to lend a favourable 
ear to sinners; then it is that we ought to call in every religious 
aid held out to faith, to arouse in ourselves, if possible, some 
sentiments of piety and of repentance. And whither, O my 
brethren, shall we fly, when unhappily fallen under the dis- 
pleasure of God! Arid what other resource could remain for 
us? It is here alone that sinners can find a refuge: here flow 
the quickening waters of the sacrament, which alone have the 
virtue of purifying the conscience: here the sacrifice of propi- 
tiation is offered up for them, alone capable of appeasing the 
justice of God, which their crimes have irritated: here the 
truths of salvation, enforced upon their heart, inspire them with 
hatred against sin and love of righteousness: here their igno- 
rance is enlightened, their errors dissipated, their weakness sus- 
tained, their good desires strengthened: here, in a word, reli- 
gion offers remedies for all their ills. It is sinners, therefore, 
who ought most to frequent these holy temples; and the more 
their wounds are inveterate and hopeless, the more eagerly ought 
they to fly here in search of a cure. 

Such is the first disposition of innocence and of purity, which 
the presence here of a holy God requires of us, as of the blessed 
in heaven: 6 4 For they are without fault before the throne of 
God." 

But if the sole state of guilt, without remorse, without any 



366 RESPECT IN THE [Serm. XXI. 



wish for a change, and with an actual intention of preserving 
in it, be a kind of irreverence, by which the sanctity of our tem- 
ples and of our mysteries is profaned; what, O my God! shall 
it be to choose these holy places, and the hour of the awful mys- 
teries, to come to inspire infamous passions; to permit them- 
selves impure looks; to form criminal desires; to seek opportu- 
nities which decency alone prevents them from seeking else- 
where; to meet objects whom the vigilance of those who instruct 
us keeps at a distance in all other resorts? What shall it be to 
make instrumental to guilt, what in religion is most holy; to 
choose thy presence, great God ! to conceal the secret of an im- 
pure passion, and to make thy holy temple a rendezvous of ini- 
quity, a place more dangerous than even those assemblies of sin 
which religion interdicts to believers? What guilt, to come to 
crucify afresh Jesus Christ in the very place where he offers 
himself up for us every day to his Father ! What guilt, to em- 
ploy, in order to forward our own ruin, the very hour in which 
the mysteries of salvation, and the redemption of all men, are 
operated! What madness, to come to choose the eyes of our 
Judge to render him the witness of our crimes, and of his pre- 
sence to make the most horrible cause of our condemnation ! 
What a neglect of God, and what a mark of reprobation, to 
change the sacred asylums of our reconciliation into opportu- 
nities of debauchery and licentiousness ! 

Great God! when insulted on Mount Calvary, where thou 
wert still a suffering God, the tombs opened around Jerusalem; 
the dead arose, as if to reproach to their descendants the hor- 
ror of their sacrilege. Ah ! re-animate then the ashes of our 
fathers who await, in this holy temple, the blessed immortality; 
let their bodies rise out of these pompous tombs which our 
vanity hath erected to them; and, inflamed with a holy indig- 
nation against irreverences which crucify thee afresh, and which 
profane the sacred asylum of the remains of their mortality, let 
them appear upon these monuments; and, since our instruc- 
tions and our threatnings are unavailing, let them come them- 
selves to reproach to their successors their irreligion and their 
sacrileges. But if the terror of thy presence, O my God ! be 
insufficient to retain them in respect, were the dead even to 
rise up, as thou hast formerly said, they would, in consequence 
of it, be neither more religious nor more believing. 

But if the presence of a holy God require here, as of the 
blessed in heaven, a disposition of purity and innocence; the 
presence of a God, terrible and full of majesty, requires one of 
dread and of internal collection : Second disposition, marked by 
the profound humiliation of the blessed in the heavenly temple; 
" And they fell before the throne on their faces, and worshipped 
God." 

Part II. God is spirit and truth, and it is in spirit and in 



Sehm. XXL] 



TEMPLES OF GOD. 



267 



truth that he requireth principally to be honoured. That dispo- 
sition of profound humiliation which we owe to him in our tem- 
ples consists not, therefore, solely in the external posture of our 
bodies; it also comprises, like that of the blessing in heaven, a 
spirit of adoration, of praise, of prayer, and of thanksgiving; 
and such is that spirit of religion and of humilition which God 
demandeth of us in the holy temple, similar to that of the blessed 
in the heavenly temple. 

I say a spirit of adoration; for as it is here that God manifest- 
eth his wonders and his supreme greatness, and descendeth from 
heaven to receive our homages, the first sentiments which should 
be formed within us, on entering into this holy place, is a senti- 
ment of terror, of silence, and profound recollection, of internal 
humiliation, on vewing the majesty of the Most High and our 
own meanness; to be occupied with God alone who showeth 
himself to us : to feel all the weight of his glory and of his pre- 
sence; to collect all our attention, all our thoughts all our de- 
sires, our whole soul, to pay him the homage of it, and to cast 
it wholly at the feet of the God whom we worship; to forget 
all the grandeurs of the earth; to see only him, to be occupied 
only with him; and, by our profound humiliation, to confess like 
the blessed in heaven, that he alone is almighty, alone immortal, 
alone great, alone worthy of all our love and of our homages. 

But, alas ! my brethren, where, in our temples, are those re- 
spectful souls, who, seized with a holy dread at the sight of 
these sacred places, feel all the weight of the majesty of the 
God who dwelleth in them, and are incapable of supporting the 
splendour of his presence, otherwise than in the immobility of 
a humiliated body, and the profound religion of a soul who 
adores? Where are those who, losing sight of all the grandeurs 
of the earth, are here occupied with that of God alone? Let us 
boldly say it before a king, whose profound respect, at the foot 
of the altar, does equal honour to religion and to himself; it is 
not to honour the God who dwelleth here that too many en- 
ter into this holy temple; it is to cover themselves with the 
cloak of piety, and to make it instrumental towards views and 
interests which sincere piety condemns. They come to bow the 
knee, as Haman bowed it before the profane altar, to attract the 
regards and to follow the example of the prince who worships; 
they come there to seek another God than he who appears on 
our altars; to make their court to another master than the Su- 
preme Master; to seek other favours than the grace of Heaven; 
and to attract the kindness of another paymaster than the im- 
mortal Rewarder. Amid a crowd of worshippers he is an un- 
known God in his own temple, as he formerly was in the pagan 
Athens. Every look here is for the prince, who hath none him- 
self but for God: all wishes are addressed to him; and his pro- 
found humiliation at the foot of the altar, far from teaching us 
to respect here the Lord, before whom a great king bows his 



368 



RESPECT IN THE 



[Serm. XXI. 



head and forgets all his greatness, teaches us only to take ad- 
vantage of his religion, and of the favours with which he ho- 
nours virtue, to adopt their semblance, and, through that de- 
ception, to exalt ourselves to new degrees of greatness upon the 
earth. O my God! is not this what thou announcedst to thy 
disciples — that times would come when faith should be extin- 
guished, when piety would become an infamous traffic, and when 
men, living without God upon the earth, would no longer ac- 
knowledge thee but in order to make thee subservient to their 
iniquitous derises? 

A spirit of prayer is also comprised in this disposition of hu- 
miliation; for the more we are struck here with the greatness 
and with the power of the God whom we worship, the more do 
our endless wants warn us to have recourse to him from whom 
alone we can obtain relief and deliverance from them. Thus 
the temple is the house of prayer, where every one ought to 
come to lay his secret wants before the Lord; where, in public 
calamities, he is appeased by the general prayers; where the 
assembled ministers lift up their hands for the sins of the peo- 
ple; and where the eyes of the Lord are ever open to our wants, 
and his ears attentive to our cries. 

Not but we may address ourselves to him, as the apostle 
says, in every place; but the temple is the spot where he is 
more propitious, and where he hath promised to be always 
present to receive our homages, and to lend a favourable ear 
to our requests. Yes, my brethren, it is here that we ought to 
come to join m lamentation with the church, over the scandals 
with which she is afflicted, over the divisions with which she is 
torn, and over the dangers which surround her; over the obsti- 
nacy of sinners, and the coldness of charity among believers : we 
come with her to solicit the mercies of the Lord upon his 
people; to intreat of him the cessation of wars and other public 
scourges; the extinction of schisms and errors; the knowledge 
and the love of righteousness and of truth for sinners; and per- 
severance for the just. You ought, therefore, to come with an 
attentive and collected mind, a prepared heart, and which offers 
nothing to the eyes of God that may avert the favours solicited 
by the church for you, and to appear with that exterior of a 
suppliant, which, of itself, shows that he prays and that he 
worships. 

Nevertheless, my brethren, while the ministers are lifting up 
their hands here for you; are supplicating the Lord for the 
prosperity of your families, for abundance to your lands, for 
the preservation of your relations and children, who perhaps 
expose themselves for the welfare of their country, for the end 
of wars, dissensions, and all the miseries with which we are 
afflicted; while they are in treating remedies for your backslid- 
ings, and aids for your weakness; while they are speaking to 
the holy God in your favour, you deign not even to accompany 



Seem. XXL] TEMPLES OF GOD. 



869 



their prayers with your attention and your respect. You dis- 
honour the holy gravity of the church's lamentations by a spirit 
of inattention, and by indecencies which would hardly become 
even those criminal resorts where you listen to profane songs ; 
and the only indifference in your behaviour is, that, in the one, 
you are touched and rendered attentive by alascivous harmony, 
while here you endure, with impatience, the divine songs in 
thanksgiving and in praise of the Lord. 

Thus, my brethren, in place of the public prayers arresting 
the arm of the Lord, so long impending over our heads; in place 
of the supplications, which resound in every part of our tem- 
ples, being able as formerly, to suspend the scourges of Heaven, 
to bring back days of peace and of tranquillity, to reconcile na- 
tions and kings, and to attract peace from heaven to the earth; 
alas! the days of evil still endure; the times of trouble, of 
mourning, and of desolation cease not; war and fury seem to 
have for ever taken up their abode among men; the desolate 
widow demands her husband; the afflicted father in vain looks 
out for his child; brother is divided from brother; even our 
successes shed mourning and sorrow through our families, and 
we are forced to weep over our own victories. Whence comes 
this ? Ah ! it is that the prayers of the church, the only sources 
of the favours which God sheddeth upon kingdoms and upon 
empires, are no longer listened to; and that you force the Lord, 
through the irreverence with which you accompany them, to 
avert his ears, and to turn his attention from them, and which 
thereby renders them useless to the earth. 

But, not only ought you to appear here as suppliants, and in 
a spirit of prayer, since it is here that the Lord dealeth out his 
favours and his grace; as it is here, likewise, that every thing 
renews to you the remembrance of those already received, you 
ought also to bring here a spirit of gratitude and of thanksgiv- 
ing, seeing that, on whichever way you turn your eyes, every 
thing recals to you the remembrance of God's blessings, and 
the sight of his eternal mercies upon your soul. 

And, firstly, it is here where? in the sacrament by which we 
are regenerated, you have become believers: it is here that the 
goodness of God, in associating you, through baptism, to the 
hope of Jesus Christ, hath discerned you from so many heathens 
who know him not: it is here that you have engaged your faith 
to the Lord; your written promises are still preserved under 
the altar. Here is the book of the covenant which you have 
made with the God of your fathers: you should no longer, 
then, appear here but to ratify the engagements of your baptism 
and to thank the Lord for the inestimable blessing which hath 
associated you with his people, and honoured you with the name 
of Christian, you ought to feel all the tenderness and respect 
of a child, for the blessed womb which hath brought you forth 



370 RESPECT IN THE [Serm. XXL 

in Jesus Christ, and the glory of this house ought to be your 
glory. 

What are you then, when, in place of bringing your thanks- 
givings to the feet of the altar for so singular and so distinguish- 
ed a blessing, you come to dishonour it by your irreverences : 
You are an unnatural child, who profane the place of your birth 
according to faith ; a perfidious Christian, who come to retract 
your promises before the very altars which witnessed them; 
who come to break the treaty on the sacred spot where it was 
concluded; to blot yourself out of the book of life, where your 
name was written with those of the faithful; to abjure the re- 
ligion of Jesus Christ on the very fonts where you had received 
it; to make a pompous display of all the vanities of the age, at 
the feet of the altar where you had solemnly renounced them; 
and to profess worldliness where you had made profession of 
Christianity. 

Nor is this all; for, secondly, it is here that Jesus Christ 
hath so often said to you, through the mouth of his ministers, 
"My son, thy sins are forgiven thee; go, and sin no more, lest, 
a worse thing befal thee." It is here, that, melting in tears, 
you have so often said to him, " Father, I have sinned against 
heaven and before thee." Now, my brethren, on the very spot 
where you have so often experienced the grace of forgiveness, 
not only you forget the blessing, but you come to give new 
subject of offence; on the very spot where you have so often 
appeared penitent, you proclaim yourselves still worldly and 
profane. Ah ! Far from coming to these holy tribunals to re- 
capitulate the disorders of your life; far from coming to renew 
those promises of penitence, those sentiments of compunction, 
those emotions of shame and of confusion, of which they have so 
often been the depositories; you boldly appear before them 
with an unblushing countenance, your eyes wandering here and 
there, full, perhaps, of guilt and adultery, as the apostle says, 
to renew in their presence the same infidelities that your tears 
had once expiated, and to render them ocular witnesses of the 
same prevarications of which they had been the secret confi- 
dants and the blessed purgers ! 

What more shall I say, my brethren? In the third place, 
the temple is the house of doctrine and of truth; and it is here 
that, through the mouth of the pastors, the church announces 
to you the maxims of salvation, and the mysteries of the hea- 
venly kingdom, concealed from so many infidel nations, — fresh 
motive of gratitude on your part. But, alas ! it is rather a fresh 
subject of condemnation; and even here, where, from these 
Christian pulpits, we are continually telling you from Jesus 
Christ that the unclean shall never enjoy the kingdom of hea- 
ven, you come to form profane desires; even here, where you 
are warned that you shall one day have to render account of an 
idle word, you permit yourselves criminal ones: Lastly, even 



Serm. XXL] TEMPLES OF GOD. 



371 



here, where you so often hear repeated that evil to him that 
scandalizeth, you become yourself a stumbling-block and a sub- 
ject of scandal. Thus, my brethren, why do you believe that 
the word of the gospel, which we preach to princes and to the 
grandees of the earth, is no longer but a tinkling brass, and 
that our ministry is now become almost unnecessary? It may 
be that our private weaknesses place a bar to the fruit, and to 
the progress of the gospel, and that God bless not a ministry the 
ministers of which are not pleasing in his sight: But, besides this 
reason, so humiliating for us, and which we cannot, however, ei- 
ther dissemble from you or even conceal from ourselves, it is, 
doubtless, the profanation of the temples, and the indecent and 
disrespectful manner in which you listen to us, that deprive the 
word, of which we are the ministers, of all its energy and virtue. 
The Lord, estranged from this holy place through your profana- 
tions \ no longer giveth increase to our toils, nor sheddeth his grace, 
which alone causeth his doctrine and his word to fructify: He 
no longer looketh upon these assemblies, formerly so holy, but 
as an assembly of worldly-minded, of voluptuous, of ambitious, 
and of profane. And how would you that he turn not his coun- 
tenance from them, and that the word of his gospel fructify 
there. Reconcile, in the first place, with him, by your ho- 
mages, by your collected behaviour, and by your piety, these 
houses of the doctrine and of truth: then will he compensate 
for your deficiencies; he will open your hearts to our instruc- 
tions, and his word shall no longer return empty to him. 

But a final reason, which renders your irreverential behaviour 
still more criminal and more disgraceful to religion, is, that it 
is in the temple where you come to offer up, in one sense, with 
the priest, the awful sacrifice, to renew the oblation of the cross, 
and to present to God the blood of his Son as the propitiation 
of your sins. Now, my brethren, while mysteries so august are 
celebrating; during these awful moments when heaven opens 
above our altars; in a time when the affair of your salvation is 
agitated between Jesus Christ and his Father; while the blood 
of the Lamb is flowing upon the altar to wash you from stain; 
while the angels of heaven tremble and adore; while the solem- 
nity of the ministers, the majesty of the ceremonies, and even 
the piety of the true believers, all inspire fear, gratitude, and re- 
spect, scarcely do you bow the knee, scarcely do you cast a look 
upon the holy altar, where mysteries so blessed for you are con- 
summating. It is even with reluctance that you are in the 
temple; you measure the duration and the fatiguing length of 
the salutary sacrifice; you count the moments of a time so pre- 
cious to the earth, and so replete with wonders and grace for 
men. You who are so embarrassed with your time, who sacrifice 
it to an eternal inutility and circle of nothings, and who are 
even difficulted in contriving to kill it; you complain of the 



RESPECT IN THE 



[Serm. XXI. 



pious solemnity of the minister, and of the circumspection with 
which he treats the holy things. Ah! you require such respect 
and such precaution in those who serve you; and you would 
that a priest clothed in all his dignity, that a priest representing 
Jesus Christ, and performing his office of mediator and high- 
priest with his Father, should treat the holy mysteries with pre- 
cipitation, and dishonour the presence of the God whom he 
serves, and whom he immolates, hy a shameful carelessness and 
hasted In what times. O my God, are we come? And was 
it to he expected that thy most precious and most signal kind- 
nesses should become a burden to the Christians of our ages? 

Alas! the first believers, who met in the temple at stated 
hours of the day, to celebrate, in hymns and songs with their 
pastor, the praises of the Lord, they almost never quitted these 
sacred abodes, and that onlv with regret, when obliged to at- 
tend to the affairs of the age. and to the duties of their station. 
How beautiful, my brethren, to see in those happy times the 
holy assembly of believers in the house of prayer, each in the 
place adapted to his station: on one side, the recluse, the holy 
confessors, the common believers: on the other, the virgins, the 
widows, the married women, — all attentive to the holy myste- 
ries, all beholding, with tears of joy and of religion, to now upon 
the altar, the blood still reeking, as I may say, of the Lamb, 
and so lately crucified before their eyes: praying for the princes, 
tor the Cfesars. for their persecutors, for their brethren; mu- 
tually exhorting each other to martyrdom: tasting all the conso- 
lation of the divine writings explained by their holy pastors, and 
retracing, in the church of the earth, the joy. the peace, the in- 
nocence, and the profound meditation of the heavenly church ! 
How beautiful and splendid were then the tents of Jacob, al- 
though the church was vet under oppression and obscurity; and 
the enemies of faith, even the prophets of the idols, in viewing 
their good order, their innocence, and their majesty, with what 
difficulty did they refuse to them their admiration and their ho- 
mages j Alas ! and at present the rapid moments which you con- 
secrate here to religion, and which ought to sanctity the remain- 
der of the day. often become themselves the greatest guilt of it. 

Lastly, my brethren, to all these inward dispositions of prayer, 
of adoration, and of gratitude, which the sanctity of our temples 
exacts of you. there is likewise to be added the external modesty, 
and the decency of ornaments and of dress — last disposition of 
the blessed in the heavenly temple: But on this part I shall be 
very brief. 

And, in effect, should any instruction on our part be neces- 
sary to you on this point, O worldly women ! for it is you whom 
this part of my discourse principally regards. To what pur- 
pose all that display. I sav not only of ostentation and of vanity, 
but of immodesty and of impudence, with which you make your 
appearance in this house of tears and of prayer? Do you come 



SfiRM. XXL] TEMPLES OF GOD. 



373 



here to dispute with Jesus the looks and the homages of those 
who worship him? Do you come to insult the mysteries which 
operate the salvation of believers, by seeking to corrupt their 
hearfat the feet even of the altars, where these mysteries take 
place for them? Are you determined that innocence shall in 
no place of the earth, not even in the temple, that asylum of 
religion and piety, be protected from your profane and lascivi- 
ous nakedness? Doth the world not sufficiently furnish you 
with impure theatres, with assemblies of dissipation, where you 
may make a boast of being a stumbling-block to your brethren? 
Even your houses, open to dissipation and to riot, do they not 
suffice for you to figure with an indecency which would former- 
ly have been suited only to houses of debauchery and of guilt; 
and which is the cause that, not respecting yourselves, that re- 
spect is lost for you, of which the national politeness hath al- 
ways been so jealous? for modesty alone is estimable, as St. 
Paul formerly reproached to believers. Must the holy temple 
be also stained by your immodesties? Ah ! when you appear be- 
fore your earthly sovereign, you mark, by the dignity and by 
the propriety of your deportment, the respect which you know 
to be due to his presence; and, before the Sovereign of heaven 
and of the earth, you make your appearance, not only without 
precaution, but even without decency or modesty; and you dis- 
play under his eyes an effrontery which wounds even the eyes 
of the wise and respectable ! You come to disturb the attention 
of the believers who had expected to have found here a place of 
peace and of silence, and an asylum against all the objects of 
vanity; to disturb even the deep meditation and the holy gravity 
of the ministers, and to sully, by the indecency of your dress, 
the purity of their looks attentive to the holy things. 

Thus the apostle desired, that the Christian women should 
be covered with a veil in the temple, on account of the angels; 
that is to say, of the priests, who are continually present there 
before God, and whose innocence and purity ought to equal 
that of the heavenly spirits. True it is, that thou thereby 
warnest us, O my God, what ought, in our temples, to be the 
holy gravity, and the inviolable sanctity of thy ministers; that 
it is for us to bear here, stamped upon our countenance, the 
holy dread of the mysteries which we offer up, and the lively 
and intimate sense of thy presence; that it is for us to inspire 
here the people around us with respect, by the sole appearance 
of our modesty; that it is for us not to appear around the altar, 
and employed in the holy ministry, often more wearied, more 
careless^ and more in haste than even the assisting multitude; 
and not to authorise their irreverences by our own. For, O 
my God ! the desolation of thy holy place hath commenced with 
the sanctuary itself; the respect of the people there hath become 
weakened only in consequence of being no longer supported by 
the holy gravity of the worship and the majesty of the ceremo- 



374 RESPECT IN THE TEMPLES, &c. [Sehm. XXI. 



nies; and thy house hath begun to be a house of dissipation and 
of scandal, only since thy ministers have made of it a house 
of traffic, of weariness, and of avarice. But our examples, in 
authorizing your profanations, do not excuse them, my breth- 
ren. 

And, in effect, it seems that God hath never left them un- 
punished. The shameful indecencies of the children of Levi, 
which had so long profaned his house, were followed with the 
most dismal calamities: the holy ark became a prey to the Phi- 
listines; it was placed at the side of Dagon, in an infamous 
temple; the glory of Israel was blasted; the Lord withdrew 
himself from amidst his people : the lamp of Judah was extin- 
guished; there was no high-priest, and Jacob was, all of a sud- 
den, without altar and without sacrifice. 

There is little doubt, my brethren, but that the miseries of 
the last age have been the fatal consequences of the profanations 
and of the irreverences of our fathers. It was just that the 
Lord should abandon temples where he had so long been insult- 
ed. Dread, my brethren, lest we prepare for our posterity the 
same calamities, in imitating the disorders of those who have 
preceded us. Dread, lest an irritated God should one day 
abandon these temples which we profane, and lest they, in their 
turn, become the asylum of error. What do I know but that 
he is already preparing all these evils for us, in permitting the 
purity and the simplicity of faith to be adulterated in the minds, 
in multiplying those men so wise in their own conceit, and so 
common in this age, who measure every thing by the lights of a 
weak reason, who would wish to fathom the secrecies of God, 
and who, far from making religion the subject of their worship 
and of their thanksgivings, make it the subject of their doubts 
and of their censures? Thou art terrible in thy judgments, O 
my God ! and thy punishments are sometimes so much the more 
rigorous, as they have been tardy and slow. 

Let us reflect, then, my brethren, on all these grand motives 
of religion; let us bring into this holy place a tender and an 
attentive piety, a spirit of piety, of compunction, of collection, 
of thanksgiving, of adoration, and of praise; let us never quit 
our temples without bearing from them some new grace, since 
here is the throne of mercy from whence they are shed upon 
men; never quit them without an additional relish for heaven, 
without new desires of terminating your errors, and of attaching 
yourselves solely to God; without envying the happiness of 
those who serve him, who have it in their power to be conti- 
nually worshipping him at the feet of the altar,"and whose sta- 
tion and functions particularly consecrate them to this holy mi- 
nistry. Say to him, as the queen of Sheba formerly said to 
Solomon, " Happy are thy men, happy are these thy servants, 
which stand continually before thee, and that hear thy wisdom." 
And, should the duties of your station not permit you to come 
here to worship the Lord at the different hours of the day, when 



Serm. XXII.] THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. 



375 



his ministers assemble to praise him; ah! continually turn, at 
least, towards the holy place, like the Israelites formerly, your 
longings and your desires. Let our temples be the sweetest con- 
solation of your troubles, the only asylum of your afflictions, 
the only resource of your wants, the most certain recreation 
from the confinements, the fatiguing attentions, and the painful 
subjections of the world: in a word, find there the beginning 
of that unalterable peace, the plenitude and the consummation 
of which you will find only with the blessed, in the eterna 
temple of the heavenly Jerusalem. 



SERMON XXII. 

THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. 

Matthew, viii. 10. 

Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no not in 

Israel 

Whence came then the incredulity with which Jesus Christ 
at present reproaches the- Jews; and what cause could they still 
have for doubting the sanctity of his doctrine and the truth of 
his ministry? They had demanded miracles, and, before their 
eyes, he had wrought such evident ones that no persons before 
him had done the like. They had wished that his missions were 
authorised by testimonies; Moses and the prophets had amply 
borne them to him; the precursor had openly proclaimed, Be- 
hold the Christ and the Lamb of God, which taketh away the 
sins of the world; a Gentile renders glory in our gospel to his 
almightiness; the heavenly Father had declared from on high, 
that it was his well-beloved Son; lastly, the demons themselves, 
struck with his sanctity, quitted the bodies, in confessing that 
he was the Holy, and the Son of the living God. What could 
the incredulity of the Jews still oppose to so many proofs and 
prodigies? 

Behold, my brethren, what, with much greater surprise 
might be demanded at those unbelieving minds, who after the 
fulfilment of all that had been foretold, after the consummation 
of the mysteries of Jesus Christ, the exaltation of his name, the 
manifestation of his gifts, the calling of his people, the destruc- 
tion of idols, the conversion of Caesars, and the agreement of 
the universe, still doubt, and take upon themselves to confute 
and to overthrow what the toils of the apostolic men, the blood 



376 



THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. [Se*m. XXII. 



of so many martyrs, the prodigies of so many servants of Jesus 
Christ, the writings of so many great men, the austerities of so 
many holy anchorites, and the religion of seventeen hundred 
years, have so universally and so divinely established in the 
minds of almost all people. 

For, my brethren, amid all the triumphs of faith, children of 
unbelief still privately spring up among us, whom God hath 
delivered up to the vanity of their own thoughts, and who blas- 
pheme what they know not; impious men, who change, as the 
apostle says, the grace of our God into wantonness, defile their 
flesh, contemn all rule, blaspheme majesty, corrupt all their 
ways like the animals not gifted with reason, and are set apart 
to serve one day as an example of the awful judgments of God 
upon men. 

Now, if, among so many believers assembled here through 
religion, any soul of this description should happen to be, allow 
me, you, my brethren, who preserve with respect the sacred 
doctrine which you have received from your ancestors and from 
your pastors, to seize this opportunity either of undeceiving 
them or of confuting their incredulity. Allow me for once to 
do here what the first pastors of the church so often did before 
their assembled people, that is to say, to take upon myself the 
defence of the religion of Jesus Christ against unbelief; and, 
before entering into the particulars of your duties during this 
long term, allow me to begin by laying the first foundations of 
faith. It is so consoling for those who believe to find how rea- 
sonable their submission is, and to be convinced that faith, 
which is apparently the rock of reason, is, however, its only 
consolation, guide, and refuge ! 

Here then is my whole design. The unbeliever refuses sub- 
mission to the revealed truths, either through a vain affectation 
of reason, or through a false sentiment of pride, or through an 
ill-placed love of independence. 

Now, I mean at present to show, that the submission which 
the unbeliever refuses, through a vain affectation of reason, is 
the most prudent use which he can make even of reason: that 
the submission which he refuses through a false sentiment of 
pride, is the most glorious step of it; and lastly, that the sub- 
mission which he rejects through an ill-placed love of indepen- 
dence, is the most indispensable sacrifice of it. And from thence 
I shall draw the three great characters of religion : It is reason- 
able, it is glorious, it is necessary. 

O my Saviour, eternal author and finisher of our faith, de- 
fend thyself, thy doctrine. Suffer not that thy cross, by which 
the universe hath been submitted to thee, be still the folly and 
the scandal of proud minds. Once more triumph at present, 
through the secret wonders of thy grace, over that same unbe- 
lief which thou formerly triumphedst over through the striking 
operations of thy power; and by those lively lights, which en- 



Sirm. XXIL] THE TROTH OF RELIGION. 37T 



lighten hearts, more efficacious than all our discourses, destroy 
every sentiment of pride which may still rise up against the 
knowledge of thy mysteries. 

Part I. Let us begin with admitting that it is faith, and not 
reason, which makes Christians; and that the first step exacted 
of a disciple of Jesus Christ, is to captivate his mind, and to 
believe what he may not comprehend. Nevertheless, I say, that 
we are led to that submission by reason itself; that the more 
even our lights are superior, the more do they point out the 
necessity of our submission; and that unbelief, far from being 
the result of strength of mind and of reason, is, on the contrary, 
that of error and weakness. 

In faith, reason hath therefore its uses, as it hath its limits : 
and as the law, good and holy in itself, served only to conduct to 
Jesus Christ, and there stopped as at its term; in the same way 
reason, good and just in itself, since it is the gift of God, and a 
participation of the sovereign reason, ought only to serve, and 
is given to us for the sole purpose of preparing the way for faith. 
It is forward, and quits the bounds of its first institution, when 
it attempts to go beyond these sacred limits. 

This taken for granted, let us see which of the two, viz. the 
believer or the unbeliever, makes the most prudent use of his 
reason. Submission to things held out to our belief, perhaps 
suspected of credulity, either on the side of the authority which 
proposes them; if it be light, it is weakness to give credit to 
them: or on the side of the things of which they wish to per- 
suade us; if they be in opposition to the principles of equity, of 
honour, of society, and of conscience, it is ignorance to receive 
them as true : or, lastly, on the side of the motives which are 
employed to persuade us; if they be vain, frivolous, and inca- 
pable of determining a wise mind, it is imprudence to give way 
to them. Now, it is easy to prove that the authority which ex- 
acts the submission of the believer, is the greatest, the most re- 
spectable, and the best established, which can possibly be upon 
the earth; that the truths proposed to his belief are the only 
ones conformable to the principles of equity, of honour, of so- 
ciety, and of conscience; and lastly, that the motives employed 
to persuade him are the most decisive, the most triumphant, 
and the most proper to gain submission from the least credulous 
minds. 

When I speak of the authority of the Christian religion, I do 
not pretend to confine the extent of that term to the single au- 
thority of its holy assemblies, in which, through the mouths of 
its pastors, the church makes decisions, and holds out to all 
believers the infallible rules of worship and of doctrine. As it 
is not heresy, but unbelief, which this discourse concerns, I do 
not here so much consider religion as opposed to the sects which 
the spirit of error hath separated from the unity, that is to say, 



378 



THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. [Serm. XXII. 



as confined to the sole catholic church, but as forming, since the 
beginning of the world, a society apart, sole depository of the 
knowledge of a God, and of the promise of a mediator; always 
opposed to all the religions which have since arisen in the uni- 
verse; always contradicted, and always the same; and I say that 
its authority bears along with it such shining characters of truth 
that it is impossible, without folly, to refuse submission to it. 

In the first place, in matters of religion, antiquity is a char- 
acter which reason respects; and we may say, that a preposses- 
sion is already formed in favour of that belief, consecrated by 
the religion of the first men, and by the simplicity of the pri- 
mitive times. Not but what falsehood is often decked out with 
the same titles, and that old errors exist among men, which 
seem to contest the antiquity of their origin with the truth; but 
it is not difficult, to whoever wishes to trace their history, to go 
back even to their origin. Novelty is always the constant and 
most inseparable character of error; and the reproach of the 
prophet may alike be made to them all: " They sacrifice to new 
gods that come newly up, whom their fathers feared not." 

In effect, if there be a true religion upon the earth, it must 
be the most ancient of all; for, if there be a true religion upon 
the earth, it must be the first and the most essential duty of 
man towards the God who wishes to be honoured by it. This 
duty must therefore be equally ancient as man; and, as it is 
attached to his nature, it must, as I may say, be born with him. 
And this, my brethren, is the first character by which the re- 
ligion of Christians is at once distinguished from superstitions 
and sects. It is the most ancient religion in the world. The 
first men, before an impious worship was carved out of divinities 
of wood and of stone, worshipped the same God whom we adore, 
raised up altars and offered sacrifices to him, expected from his 
liberality the reward of their virtue, and from his justice the 
punishment of their disobedience. The history of the birth of 
this religion is the history of the birth of the world itself. The di- 
vine books which have preserved it down to us, contain the first 
monuments of the origin of things. They are themselves more 
ancient than all those fabulous productions of the human mind 
which afterwards so miserably amused the credulity of the fol- 
lowing ages; and as error ever springs from the truth, and is 
only a faulty imitation of it, all the fables of paganism are found- 
ed on some of the principal features of that divine history; in- 
somuch, that it may be affirmed that every thing, even to error 
itself, renders homage to the antiquity and to the authority of 
our holy Scriptures. 

Now, my brethren, is there not already something respectable 
in this character alone? The other religions, which have vaun- 
ted a more ancient origin, have produced nothing, in support of 
their antiquity, but fabulous legends, which sunk into nothing of 
themselves. They have disfigured the history of the world by 



Serm. XXIL] THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. 



379 



a chaos of innumerable and imaginary ages, of which no event 
hath been left to posterity, and which the history of the world 
hath never known. The authors of these gross fictions did not 
write till many ages after the actions which they relate, and it 
is saying every thing to add, that that theology was the fruit of 
poesy, and the inventions of that art the most solid foundations 
of their religion. 

Here, it is a train of facts, reasonable, natural, and in agree- 
ment with itself. It is the history of a family continued from 
its first head down to him who writes it, and authenticated 
in all its circumstances. It is a genealogy in which every chief 
is characterised by his own actions, by events which still sub- 
sisted then, by marks which were still known in the places where 
they had dwelt. It is a living tradition, the most authenticated 
upon the earth, since Moses hath written only what he had heard 
from the children of the patriarchs, and they related only what 
their fathers had seen. Every part of it is coherent, hangs pro- 
perly together, and tends to clear up the whole. The features 
are not copied, nor the adventures drawn from elsewhere, and 
accommodated to the subject. Before Moses, the people of God 
had nothing in writing. He hath left nothing to posterity but 
what he had verbally collected from his ancestors, that is to say, 
the whole tradition of mankind; and the first he hath com- 
prised in one volume, the history of God's wonders and of his 
manifestations to men, the remembrance of which had till then 
composed the whole religion, the whole knowledge, and the whole 
consolation of the family of Abraham. The candour and sin- 
cerity of this author appear in the simplicity of his history. He 
takes no precaution to secure belief, because he supposes that 
those for whom he writes require none to believe; and all the 
facts which he relates being well known among them, it is more 
for the purpose of preserving them to their posterity than for 
any instruction in them to themselves. 

Behold, my brethren, which way the Christian religion be- 
gins to acquire influence over the mind of men. Turn on all 
sides, read the history of every people and of every nation, and 
you will find nothing so well established upon the earth: What 
do I say? You will find nothing more worthy the attention of a 
rational mind. If men be born for a religion, they are born for 
this one alone. If there be a Supreme Being who hath mani- 
fested the truth to men, this alone is worthy of men and of him. 
Every where else the origin is fabulous; here it is equally cer- 
tain as all the rest; and the latter ages, which cannot be dis- 
puted, are, however, only the proofs of the certitude of the first. 
Therefore, if there be an authority upon the earth to which 
reason ought to yield, it is to that of the Christian religion. 

To the character of its antiquity must be added that of its 
perpetuity. Figure to yourselves here that endless variety of 
sects and of religions which have successively reigned upon the 



380 THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. [S*rm. XXII. 



earth: Follow the history of the superstitions of every people 
and of every country; they have flourished a few years, and 
afterwards sunk into oblivion along with the power of their 
followers. Where are the gods of Emath, of Arphad, and of 
Sepharvaim? Recollect the history of those first conquerors: 
In conquering the people, they conquered the gods of the people; 
and, in overturning their power, they overturned their worship. 
How beautiful, my brethren, to see the religion of our fathers 
alone maintaining itself from the first, surviving all sects; and, 
notwithstanding the diverse fortunes of those who have pro- 
fessed it, alone passing from father to son, and braving every 
exertion to efface it from the heart of men ! It is not the arm 
of flesh which hath preserved it. Ah ! The people of God hath, 
almost always, been weak, oppressed and persecuted. No : it is 
not, says the prophet, by their own sword that our fathers got 
the land in possession; but thy right hand, O Lord, and thine 
arm, and the light of thy countenance, because thou hadst a fa- 
vour unto them. One while slaves, another fugitives, an- 
other tributaries of various nations; they a thousand times saw 
Chaldea, Assyria, Babylon, the most formidable powers of the 
earth, the whole universe, conspire their ruin and the total ex- 
tinction of their worship; but this people, so weak, oppressed 
in Egypt, wandering in the desert, and afterwards carried in 
captivity into a foreign land, no power hath ever been able to 
exterminate, while so many others, more powerful, have follow- 
ed the destiny of human things; and its worship hath always 
subsisted with itself, in spite of all the efforts made by almost 
every age to destroy it. 

Now whence comes it, that a worship so contradicted, so 
arduous in its observances, so rigorous in its punishments upon 
transgessors, and even so liable to be established or to be over- 
thrown, through the mere inconstancy and ignorance of the 
people who was its first depository; whence comes it that it 
alone hath been perpetuated amid so many revolutions, while 
the superstitions supported by all the power of empires and of 
kingdoms, have sunk into their original oblivion! Ah! is it 
not God, and not man, who hath done all these things? Is it 
not the arm of the Almighty which hath preserved his work? 
And since every thing invented by the human mind has perish- 
ed, is it not to be inferred that what hath always endured was 
alone the work of the divine wisdom? 

Lastly, If, to its antiquity and to its perpetuity, you add its 
uniformity, no pretext for resistance will be left to reason. For, 
my brethren, every thing changes upon the earth, because every 
thing follows the mutability of its origin. Occasions, the differ- 
ences of ages, the diverse humours of climates, and the neces- 
sity of the times, have introduced a thousand changes in all the 
human laws. Faith alone hath never changed. Such as our 
fathers received it, such have we at present, and such shall 



Ssrm. XXII.] THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. 



our descendants one day receive it. It hath been unfolded 
through the course of ages, and likewise, I confess, through the 
necessity of securing it from the errors which have been 
attempted to be introduced into it; but every thing which once 
appeared to belong to it, hath always appeared as appertaining 
to it. There is little wonder in the duration of a religion, when 
accommodations are made to times and to conjunctures, and 
when they may add or diminish according to the fancy of the 
ages, and of those who govern; but never to relax, in spite of 
the change of manners and of times; to see every thing change 
around, and yet be always the same, is the grand privilege of the 
Christian religion. And by these three characters, of antiquity, 
of perpetuity, and of uniformity, which exclusively belong to it, 
its authority is the only one upon the earth capable of determin- 
ing a wise mind. 

But if the submission of the believer be reasonable on the 
part of the authority which exacts it, it is not less so on the 
part of the things which are proposed to his belief. And here, 
my brethren, let us enter into the foundation of the Christian 
worship. It is not afraid of investigation, like those abomi- 
nable mysteries of idolatry, the infamy and horror of which 
were concealed by the darkest obscurity. A religion, says 
Tertullian, which would shun examination, and would dread 
being searched into, should ever be suspected. The more the 
Christian worship is investigated, the more are beauties and 
hidden wonders found in it. Idolatry inspired men with foolish 
sentiments of the Divinity; philosophy, with very unreasonable 
ones of himself: cupidity with iniquitous ones towards the rest 
of men. Now, admire the wisdom of religion, which remedies 
all these three evils, which the reason of all ages had never been 
able either to eradicate or even to find out. 

And 1st, What other legislator hath spoken of the divinity, 
like that of the Christians? Find elsewhere, if you can, more 
sublime ideas of his power, of his immensity, of his wisdom, of 
his grandeur, and of his justice, than those which are given us 
in our Scriptures. If there be over us a supreme and eternal 
Being, in whom all things live, he must be such as the Chris- 
tian religion represents him. We alone compare him not to 
the likeness of man. We alone worship him seated above the 
cherubim, filling every where with his presence, regulating all 
by his wisdom, creating light and darkness, author of good, and 
punisher of vice. We alone honour him as he wishes to be 
honoured; that is to say, we make not the worship due to 
him, to consist in the multitude of victims, nor in the external 
pomp of our homages ; but in adoration, in love, in praise, and in 
thanksgiving. We refer to him the good which is in us, as to its 
principal ; and we always attribute vice to ourselves, which takes 
its rise only in our corruption. We hope to find in him the 
reward of a fidelity which is the gift of his grace, and the pu- 



382 



THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. [Serm. XXII. 



nishment of transgressions, which are always the consequence 
of the bad use which we make of our liberty. Now what can 
be more worthy of the supreme Being than all these ideas ! 

2dly, A vain philosophy either had degraded man to the 
level of the beast, by centering his felicity in the senses; or had 
foolishly exalted him even to the likeness of God, by persuad- 
ing him that he might find his own happiness in his own wis- 
dom. Now, the Christian morality avoids these two extremes: 
it withdraws man from carnal pleasures, by discovering to him 
the excellency of his nature and the holiness of his destination; 
it corrects his pride, by making him sensible of his own wretch- 
edness and meanness. 

Lastly, Cupidity rendered man unjust towards the rest of 
men. Now, what other doctrine than that of Christians hath 
ever so well regulated our duties on this head. It instructs us 
to yield obedience to the powers established by God, not only 
through fear of their authority, but through an obligation of 
conscience: to respect our superiors, to bear with our equals, to 
be affable towards our inferiors, to love all men as ourselves. 
It alone is capable of forming good citizens, faithful subjects, 
patient servants, humble masters, incorruptible magistrates, 
element princes, and zealous friends. It alone renders the hon- 
our of marriage inviolable, secures the peace of families, and 
maintains the tranquillity of states. It not only checks usurpa- 
tions, but it prohibits even the desire of other's property; it not 
only requires us not to view with an envious eye the prosperity 
of our brother, but it commands us to share our own riches 
with him if need require; it not only forbids to attempt his life, 
but it requires us to do good, even to those who injure us: to 
bless those who curse us, and to be all only of one heart and of 
one mind. Give me, said formerly St Augustin to the heathens 
of his time, a kingdom all composed of people of this kind: 
Good God, what peace ! What felicity ! what a representation of 
heaven upon the earth ! Have all the ideas of philosophy ever come 
near to the plan of this heavenly republic? And is it not true, that 
if a God hath spoken to men, to lay open to them the ways of 
salvation, he could never have held any other language? 

To all these maxims, so worthy of reason, it is true that re- 
ligion adds mysteries which exceed our comprehension. But, 
besides that good sense should induce us to yield thereon to a 
religion so venerable through its antiquity, so divine in its mo- 
rality, so superior to every thing on the earth in its authority, 
and alone worthy of being believed, the motives it employs for 
our persuasion are sufficient to conquer unbelief. 

1st, These mysteries were foretold many ages before their 
accomplishment, and foretold with every circumstance of times 
and places; nor are the vague prophecies, referred to the cre- 
dulity of the vulgar alone, .uttered in a corner of the earth, of 
the same age as the events, and unknown to the rest of the uni- 



Serm. XXII.] THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. 



383 



verse. They are prophecies which, from the beginning of the 
world, have constituted the religion of an entire people; which 
fathers transmitted to their children as their most precious in- 
heritance; which were preserved in the holy temple as the most 
sacred pledge of the divine promises; and, lastly, to the truth 
of which the nation mcsHnveterate against Jesus Christ, and 
their first depository, still at present bears witness in the face of 
the whole universe: prophecies, which were not mysteriously 
hidden from the people, lest their falsehood should be betrayed; 
like those vain oracles of the Sybils, carefully shut up in the 
capitol, fabricated to support the Roman pride, exposed to the 
view of the pontiffs alone, and produced, piece-meal, from time 
to time, to authorise, in the mind of the people, either a dange- 
rous enterprise or an unjust war. On the contrary, our pro- 
phetical books were the daily study of a whole people. The young 
and the old, women and children, priests and men of all ranks, 
princes and subjects, were indispensably obliged to have them 
continually in their hands; every one was entitled to study his 
duties there, and to discover his hopes. Far from nattering 
their pride, they held forth only the ingratitude of their fathers; 
in every page they announced misfortunes to them as the just 
punishment of their crimes; to kings they reproached their dis- 
sipations, to the pontiffs their profusion, to the people their in- 
constancy and unbelief; and, nevertheless, these holy books were 
dear to them; and, from the oracles which they saw continual- 
ly accomplishing in them, they awaited with confidence the fulfil- 
ment of those which the whole universe hath now witnessed. 
Now, the knowledge of what is to come is the least suspicious 
character of the divinity. 

2dly, These mysteries are founded upon facts so evidently 
miraculous, so well known in Judea, so agreed to then, even by 
those whose interest it was to reject them, so signalized by events 
which interested the whole nation, so often repeated in the cities, 
in the country, in the temple, and in the public places, that the 
eyes must be shut against the light to call them in question. The 
apostles have preached them, have written them, even in Judea, 
a very short time after their fulfilment; that is to say, in a time 
when the pontiffs, who had condemned Jesus Christ, still living, 
might so easily have controverted and proclaimed their imposture, 
had they really been a deception upon mankind. Jesus Christ, by 
fulfilling his promise of rising again, confirmed his Gospel, and it 
is not to be supposed, either that the apostles could be deceived 
on a fact so decisive and so essential for them, — on that fact so 
often foretold, and looked forward to, as the principle point on 
which all the rest was to turn; that fact so often confirmed, 
and that before so many witnesses; nor that they themselves 
wished to deceive us, and to preach a falsehood to men at the 
expense of their own ease, honour, and life, the only return 
which they had to expect for their imposture. Would these 



384 THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. [Seem. XXIL 

men, who have left to us only such pious and wise precepts, have 
given to the earth an example of folly hitherto unknown to every 
people, and, without view, interest, or motive, have cooly devoted 
themselves to the most excruciating tortures, and to a death suf- 
fered with the most heroical piety, merely to maintain the truth 
of a thing of which they themselves knew the falsehood? Would 
these men have all tranquilly submitted to death for the sake of 
another man who had deceived them, and who, having failed in 
his promise of rising again from the grave, had only imposed, 
during life, upon their credulity and weakness? Let the im- 
pious man no longer reproach to us, as a credulity, the incom- 
prehensible mysteries of faith. He must be very credulous him- 
self to be able to persuade himself of the possibility of supposi- 
tions so absurd. 

Lastly, The whole universe hath been docile to the faith of 
these mysteries; the Cesars, whom it degraded from the rank 
of Gods; the philosophers, whom it convicted of ignorance and 
vanity; the voluptuous, to whom it preached self-denial and 
sufferance; the rich, whom it obliged to poverty and humility; 
the poor, whom it commanded to love even their abjection and 
indigence; all men, of whom it combated all the passions. This 
faith, preached by twelve poor men, without learning, talents, 
or support, hath subjected emperors, the learned equally as the 
illiterate, cities and empires; mysteries, apparently so absurd, 
have overthrown all the sects, and all the monuments of a proud 
reason, and the folly of the cross hath been wiser than all the 
wisdom of the age. The whole universe hath conspired against 
it, and every effort of its enemies hath only added fresh confir- 
mation to it. To be a believer, and to be destined to death, 
were two things inseparable; yet the danger was only an addi- 
tional charm; the more the persecutions were violent, the more 
progress did faith make; and the blood of the martyrs was the 
seed of believers. O God! who doth not feel thy finger here? 
Who, in these traits, would not acknowledge the character of 
thy work? Where is the reason which doth not feel the vanity 
of its doubts to sink into nothing here, and which still blushes 
to submit to a doctrine to which the whole universe hath yield- 
ed? But not only is this submission reasonable, it is likewise 
glorious to men? 

Part II. Pride is the secret source of unbelief. In that os- 
tentation of reason, which induces the unbeliever to contemn 
the common belief, there is a deplorable singularity which flat- 
ters him, and occasions him to suppose in himself more vigour 
of mind and more light than in the rest of men, because he 
boldly ventures to cast off a yoke to which they have all sub- 
mitted, and to stand up against what all the rest had hitherto 
been contented to worship. 

Now, in order to deprive the unbeliever of so wretched a con- 



Serm, XXII.] THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. 385 



solation, it is only necessary to demonstrate, in the first place, 
That nothing* is more glorious to reason than faith; glorious on 
the side of its promises for the future; glorious from the situa- 
tion in which it places the believer for the present; lastly, glo- 
rious from the grand models which it holds out to his imitation. 

Glorious on the side of the promises contained in it. What 
are the promises of faith, my brethren? The adoption of God, 
an immortal society with him, the complete redemption of our 
bodies, the eternal felicity of our souls, freedom from the pas- 
sions, our hearts fixed by the possession of the true riches, our 
minds penetrated with the ineffable light of the sovereign rea- 
son, and happy in the clear and always durable view of the 
truth. Such are the promises of faith; it informs us that our 
origin is divine, and our hopes eternal. 

Now, I ask, Is it disgraceful to reason to believe truths which 
do such honour to the immortality of its nature? What, my 
brethren, would it then be more glorious to man to believe him- 
self of the same nature as the beasts, and to look forward to the 
same end? What, the unbeliever would think himself more 
honoured by the conviction that he is only a vile clay, put to- 
gether by chance, and which chance shall dissolve, without end, 
destination, hope, or any other use of his reason and of his body, 
than that of brutally plunging himself, like the brutes, into car- 
nal gratifications ! What! he would have a higher opinion of 
himself when viewed in the light of an unfortunate wretch, ac - 
cidentally placed upon the earth, who looks forward to nothing 
beyond life, whose sweetest hope is that of sinking back to non- 
entity, who relates to nothing but himself, and is reduced to 
find his felicity in himself, though he can there find only anxieties 
and secret terrors ! Is this, then, that miserable distinction by 
which the pride of unbelief is so much flattered? Great God! 
how glorious to thy truth, to have no enemies but men of this 
character ! For my part, as St Ambrose formerly said to the 
unbelievers of his time, I glory in believing truths so honour- 
able to man, and in expecting the fulfilment of promises so con- 
solatory. To refuse belief to them is sorrily to punish one's 
self. Ah ! if I be deceived, in preferring the hope of one day 
enjoying the eternal society of the righteous in the bosom of 
God, to the humbling belief of being the same nature as the 
beasts, it is an error dear to me, which I delight in, and upon 
which I wish never to be undeceived. 

But if faith be glorious on the side of its promises for the fu- 
ture, it is not less so from the situation in which it places the 
believer for the present. And here, my brethren, figure to 
yourselves a truly righteous man, who lives by faith, and you 
will acknowledge that there is nothing on the earth more 
sublime. Master of his desires and of all the movements of 
his heart; exercising a glorious empire over himself; in pa- 
tience and in equanimity enjoying his soul, and regulating all 

b b 



386 



THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. [Serm. XXII. 



his passions by the bridle of temperance; humble in prosperity, 
firm under misfortunes, cheerful in tribulations, peaceful with 
those who hate peace, callous to injuries, feeling for the afflic- 
tions of those who trespass against him, faithful in his promises, 
religious in his friendships, and unshaken in his duties; little 
affected with riches, which he contemns; fatigued with honours 
which he dreads: greater than the world, which he considers 
only as a mass of earth — What dignity ! 

Philosophy conquered one vice only by another. It pomp- 
ously taught contempt of the world, merely to attract the ap- 
plauses of the world; it sought more the glory of wisdom than 
wisdom itself. In destroying the other passions, it continually, 
upon their ruins, raised up one much more dangerous; I mean to 
say pride: Like that prince of Babylon who overthrew the altars 
of the national gods, merely to exalt upon their wrecks his own 
impious statue, and that monstrous colossus of pride which he 
wanted the whole earth to worship. 

But faith exalts the just man above even his virtue. Through it 
is he still greater in the secrecy of his heart, and in the eyes 
of God, than before men. He forgives without pride; he is 
disinterested without show; he suffers without wishing it to 
be known ; he moderates his passions without perceiving it him- 
self; he alone is ignorant of the glory and of the merit of his 
actions; far from graciously looking upon himself, he is ashamed 
of his virtues much more than the sinner is of his vices; far from 
courting applause, he hides his works from the light, as if they 
were deeds of darkness; love of duty is the sole source of his vir- 
tue; he acts under the eyes of God alone, and as if there were no 
longer men upon the earth — What dignity! Find, if you can, 
any thing greater in the universe. Review all the various kinds 
of glory with which the world gratifies the vanity of men; and 
see, if, all together, they can bestow that degree of dignity to 
which the godly are raised by faith. 

Now, my dear hearer, what more honourable to man than 
this situation? Do you consider him as more glorious, more 
respectable, more grand, when he follows the impulses of a 
brutal instinct; when he is the slave of hatred, revenge, volup- 
tuousness, ambition, envy, and all those other monsters which 
alternately reign in his heart? 

For, are you who make a boast of unbelief thoroughly ac- 
quainted with what is an unbeliever? He is a man without 
morals, probity, faith, or character, who owns no rule but his 
passions, no law but his iniquitous thoughts, no master but his de- 
sires, no check but the dread of authority, no God but himself: 
an unnatural child, seeing he believes that chance alone hath given 
him fathers; a faithless friend, seeing he looks upon men, 
merely as the wretched fruits of a wild and fortuitous concur- 
rence, to whom he is connected only by transitory ties; a cruel 
master, seeing he is convinced that the strongest and the most 



Serm. XXIL] THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. 



387 



fortunate have always reason on their side. For, who could 
henceforth place any dependence upon you? You no longer 
fear a God; you no longer respect men; you look forward to no- 
thing after this life; virtue and vice are merely prejudices of edu- 
cation in your eyes, and the consequences of popular credulity. 
Adulteries, revenge, blasphemies, the blackest treacheries, abo- 
minations which we dare not even to name, are no longer, in your 
opinion, but human prohibitions, and regulations established 
through the policy of legislators. According to you, the most hor- 
rible crimes, or the purest virtues, are all equally the same, since 
an eternal annihilation shall soon equalize the just and the impi- 
ous, and for ever confound them both in the dreary mansion of the 
tomb. What a monster must you then be upon the earth ! Does 
this representation of you highly gratify your pride, or can you 
support even its idea? 

Besides, you pride yourself upon irreligion, as springing from 
your superiority of mind; but trace it to its source. What 
hath led you to free-thinking? Is it not the corruption of your 
heart? Would you have ever thought of impiety had you been 
able to ally religion with your pleasures? You began to hesitate 
upon a doctrine which incommoded your passions; and you 
have marked it down as false from the moment that you found 
it irksome. You have anxiously sought to persuade yourself 
what you had such an interest to believe; that all died with us; 
that eternal punishments were merely the terrors of education; 
that inclinations born with us could never be crimes; what 
know I? And all those maxims of free-thinking originating 
from hell. We are easily persuaded of what we wish. Solomon 
worshipped the gods of foreign women only to quiet himself in his 
debaucheries. If men had never had passions, or if religion had 
countenanced them, unbelief would never have appeared upon 
the earth. And a proof that what I say is true, is, that in the mo- 
ments when you are disgusted with guilt, you imperceptibly 
turn towards religion; in the moments when your passions are 
more cool, your doubts diminish ; you render, as if in spite of 
yourself, a secret homage in the bottom of your heart to the 
truth of fath: in vain you try to weaken it, you cannot succeed 
in extinguishing it; at the first signal of death, you raise your 
eyes towards heaven, you acknowledge the God whose finger is 
upon you, you cast yourself upon the bosom of your Father and 
the Author of your being; you tremble over a futurity which 
you had vaunted not to believe; and, humbled under the hand 
of the Almighty, on the point of falling upon and crushing you 
like a worm of the earth, you confess that he is alone great, alone 
wise, alone immortal, and that man is only vanity and lies. 

Lastly, If fresh proofs were necessary to my subject, I could 
prove to you how glorious faith is to man, on the side of the 
grand models which it holds out for our imitation. Consider Abra- 
ham, Isaac, and Jacob, said formerly the Jews to their children. 



398 



THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. [Serm. XXII. 



Consider the holy men who have gone hefore you, to whom 
their faith hath merited so honourable a testimony, said former- 
ly St Paul to the faithful, after having related to them, in that 
beautiful chapter of his epistle to the Hebrews, their names, 
and the most wonderful circumstances of their history, from age 
to age. 

Behold the excellency of the Christian faith. Recollect all 
the great men who, in all ages, have submitted to it; such 
magnanimous princes, such religious conquerors, such venera- 
ble pastors, such enlightened philosophers, such estimable learned 
men, wits so vaunted in their age, such noble martyrs, such 
penitent authorities, such pure and constant virgins, heroes in 
every description pf virtue. Philosophy preached a pompous 
wisdom; but its sa^e was no where to be found. Here what 
a cloud of witnesses ! What an uninterrupted tradition of Chris- 
tian heroes from the blood of Abel down to us ! 

Now, I ask, Shall you blush to tread in the steps of so many 
illustrious names ? Place on the one side all the great men whom, 
in all ages, religion hath given to the world, and on the other 
that small number of black and desperate minds whom unbe- 
lief hath produced. Doth it appear more honourable for you to 
rank yourself among the latter party? To adopt for guides, and 
for your models, those men whose names are only recollected 
with horror, those monsters whom it hath pleased Providence 
to permit that nature should from time to time, bring forth; 
or the Abrahams, the Josephs, the Moseses, the Davids, the 
apostolic men, the righteous of ancient and of modern times? 
Support, if you can, this comparison. Ah! said formerly St 
Jerome, on a different occasion, If you believe me in' error, it is 
glorious for me to be deceived with such guides. 

And here, my brethren, leaving unbelievers for a moment, 
allow me to address myself to you. Avowed unbelief is a vice 
perhaps rare among us, but the simplicity of faith is not perhaps 
less so. We would feel a horror at quitting the belief of our 
fathers; but we wish to refine upon our sincerity. We do 
not permit ourselves to doubt upon the main part of the mys- 
teries; but obedience is philosophically given, by imposing our 
own yoke, by weighing the holy truths, receiving some as rea- 
sonable, reasoning upon others, and measuring them by our own 
feeble lights; and our age, more than any other, is full of these 
half believers, who, under the pretext of taking away from re- 
ligion all that credulity or prejudice may have added to it, de- 
prive faith of the whole merit of submission. 

Now, my brethren, sanctity ought only to be spoken of with 
a religious circumspection. Faith is a virtue almost equally de- 
licate as modesty: a single doubt, a single word injures it; a 
breath, as I may say, tarnishes it. Yet, nevertheless, what 
licence do they not allow themselves in modern conversations 
on all that is most respectable in the faith of our fathers? Alas! 
the terrible name of the Lord could not be even pronounced un- 



Serm. XXIL] THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. 389 



der the law by the mouth of man; and, at present, all that is 
most sacred and most august in religion is become a common 
subject of conversation: there every thing is talked over, and 
freely decided upon. Vain and superficial men, whose only know- 
ledge of religion consists of a little more temerity than the illi- 
terate and the common people; producing, as their whole stock 
of learning, some common-place and hackneyed doubts, which 
they have picked up, but never had formed themselves; doubts 
which have so often been cleared up, that they seem now to 
exist no longer but to glorify the truth; men who, amid the 
most dissolute manners, have never devoted an hour of serious 
attention to the truth of religion, — act the philosopher, and bold- 
ly decide upon points which a whole life of study, accompanied 
with learning and piety, could scarcely clear up. 

Even persons of a sect, in whom ignorance on certain points 
would be meritorious, and who, though knowing, good-breeding 
and decency require that they should affect to be ignorant; per- 
sons who are better acquainted with the world than with Jesus 
Christ; who even know not of religion what is necessary to re- 
gulate their manners, — pretend doubts, wish to have them ex- 
plained, are afraid of believing too much, have suspicions upon the 
whole, yet have none upon their own miserable situation and 
the visible impropriety of their life. O God ! it is thus that 
thou deliverest up sinners to the vanity of their own fancies, 
and permittest that those who pretend to penetrate into thine 
adorable secrecies know not themselves. Faith is therefore 
glorious to man: this has just been shown to you: it now remains 
for me to prove that it is necessary to him. 

Part III. Of all the characters of faith, the necessity of it 
is the one which renders the unbeliever most inexcusable. All 
the other motives which are employed to lead him to the truth, 
are foreign, as I may say, to him; this one is drawn from his 
own ground- work, — I mean to say, from the nature itself of his 
reason. 

Now, I say that faith is absolutely necessary to man, in the 
gloomy and obscure paths of this life; for his reason is weak 
and it requires to be assisted; because it is corrupted, and it 
requires to be cured; because it is changeable, and it requires 
to be fixed. Now, faith alone is the aid which assists and en- 
lightens it, the remedy which cures it, the bridle and the rule 
which retains and fixes it. Yet a moment of attention; I shall 
not misemploy it. 

I say, 1st, That reason is weak, and that an aid is necessary 
to it. Alas ! my brethren, we know not, either ourselves, nor 
what is external to us. We are totally ignorant how we have 
been formed, by what imperceptible progressions our bodies have 
received arrangement and life, and what are the infinite springs, 
and the divine skill, which give motion to the whole machine. 



390 THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. [Serm. XXIL 



I cannot tell," said that illustrious mother, mentioned in the 
Maccabees, to her children, "how ye came into my womb; for 
I neither gave you breath nor life, neither was it I that formed 
the members of every one of you: but doubtless the Creator of 
the world, who formed the generation of man, and found out 
the beginning of all things, will also, of his own mercy, give you 
breath and life again, as ye now regard not your own selves for 
his law's sake." Our body is itself a mystery, in which the 
human mind is lost and overwhelmed, and of which the secrets 
shall never be fathomed; for there is none but him alone who 
hath presided at its formation, who is capable of comprehending 
them. 

That breath of the divinity which animates us, that portion 
of ourselves which renders us capable of loving and of knowing, 
is not less unknown to us; we are entirely ignorant how its de- 
sires, its fears, its hopes are formed and how it can give to itself 
its ideas and images. None have yet been able to comprehend how 
that spiritual being, so different in its nature from matter, hath 
possibly been united in us with it by such indissoluble ties, that 
the two substances no longer form but one whole, and the good 
and evil of the one become the good and evil of the other. We 
are a mystery therefore to ourselves, as St Augustin formerly 
said; and we would be difficulted to say, what is even that vain 
curiosity which pries into every thing, or how it hath been form- 
ed in our soul. 

In all around us we still find nothing but enigmas; we live as 
strangers upon the earth, and amid objects which we know not. 
To man, nature is a closed book; and the Creator, to confound, 
it would appear, human pride, hath been pleased to overspread 
the face of this abyss with an impenetrable obscurity. 

Lift up thine eyes, O man ! Consider those grand luminaries 
suspended over your head, and which swim, as I may say, through 
those immense spaces in which thy reason is lost. Who, says 
Job, hath formed the sun, and given a name to the infinite mul- 
titude of stars? Comprehend, if thou can, their nature, their 
use, their properties, their situation, their distance, their revolu- 
tion, the equality or the inequality of their movements. Our 
age hath penetrated a little into their obscurity, that is to say, 
it hath a little better conjectured upon them than the preceding 
ages; but what are its discoveries when compared to what we 
are still ignorant of? 

Descend upon the earth, aud tell us, if thou know, what it is 
that keeps the winds bound up; what regulates the course of 
the thunders and of the tempests; what is the fatal boundary 
which places its mark, and says to the rushing waves, " Here 
you shall go and no farther;" and how the prodigy so regular 
of its movements is formed; explain to us the surprising effects 
of plants, of metals, of the elements; find out in what manner 
gold is purified in the bowels of the earth; unravel, if thou can, 



Serm. XXII.] THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. 



391 



the infinite skill employed in the formation of the very insects 
which crawl before us; give us an explanation of the various 
instincts of animals — turn on every side; nature in all her parts 
offers nothing to thee but enigmas. O man ! thou knowest no- 
thing of the objects, even under thine eyes, and thou wouldest 
pretend to fathom the eternal depths of faith ! Nature is a mys- 
tery to thee, and thou wouldst have a religion which had none ! 
Thou art ignorant of the secrets of man, and thou Would pre- 
tend to know the secrets of God ! Thou knowest not thyself, 
and thou would pretend to fathom what is so much above thee ! 
The universe, which God hath yielded up to thy curiosity and 
to thy disputes, is an abyss in which thou* art lost; and thou 
wouldst that the mysteries of faith, which he hath solely expo- 
sed to thy docility and to thy respect, should have nothing which 
surpasses thy feeble lights! — O blindness! were every thing, 
excepting religion, clear and evident, thou then, with some show 
of reason, mightst mistrust its obscurities; but since every 
thing around thee is a labyrinth in which thou art bewildered, 
ought not the secret of God, as Augustin formerly said, to render 
thee more respectful and more attentive, far from being more 
incredulous? 

The necessity of faith is therefore founded, in the first place, 
upon the weakness of reason; but it is likewise founded upon 
its profound depravity. And, in effect, what was more natural 
to man than to confess his God the author of his being and of 
his felicity, his end and his principle; than to adore his wisdom, 
his power, his goodness, and all those divine perfections of which 
he hath engraved upon his work such profound and evident 
marks? These lights were born with us. Nevertheless, review 
all those ages of darkness and of superstition which preceded 
the gospel, and see how far man had degraded his Creator, and 
to what he had likened his God. There was nothing so vile in 
the created world but his impiety erected into Gods, and man 
was the noblest divinity which was worshipped by man. 

If, from religion, you pass to the morality, all the principles 
of natural equity were effaced, and man no longer bore written 
in his heart the work of that law which nature has engraven on 
it. Plato, even that man so wise, and who, according to St. 
Augustin, had so nearly approached to the truth, nevertheless 
abolishes the holy institution of marriage; and, permitting a 
brutal confusion among men, he for ever does away all paternal 
names and rights, which, even in animals, nature hath so evi- 
dently respected; and gives to the earth men all uncertain of 
their origin, all coming into the world without parents, as I may 
say; and consequently without ties, tenderness, affection, or 
humanity; all in a situation to become incestuous, or parricides, 
without even knowing it. 

Others came to announce to men that voluptuousness was the 
sovereign good; and whatever might have been the intention of 



392 



THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. [Serm. XXII. 



the first author of this sect, it is certain that his disciples sought 
no other felicity than that of brutes; the most shameful de- 
baucheries became philosophical maxims. Rome, Athens, Co- 
rinth, beheld excesses, where, it may be said, that man was no 
longer man. Even this is nothing; the most abominable vices 
were consecrated there: temples and altars were erected to 
them: lasciviousness, incest, cruelty, treachery, and other still 
more abandoned crimes, were made divinities of: the worship 
became a public debauch and prostitution; and gods, so crimi- 
nal, were no longer honoured but by crimes; and the apostle, 
who relates them to us, takes care to inform us, that such was 
not merely the licentiousness of the people, but of sages and 
philosophers who had erred in the vanity of their own thoughts, 
and whom God had delivered up to the corruption of their 
own heart. — O God! in permitting human reason to fall into 
such horrible errors, thou intended to let man know, that rea- 
son, when delivered up to its own darkness, is capable of every 
thing, and that it can never take upon itself to be its own guide, 
without plunging into abysses from which thy law and thy light 
are alone capable of withdrawing him. 

Lastly, if the depravity of reason so evidently expose the 
necessity of a remedy to cure it, its eternal inconstancies and 
fluctuations yet more instruct man that a check and a rule are 
absolutely necessary to fix it. 

And here, my brethren, if the brevity of a discourse would 
permit all to be said, what vain disputes, what endless ques- 
tions, what different opinions, have formerly engrossed all the 
schools of the heathen philosophy ! And think not that it was 
upon matters which God seems to have yielded up to the con- 
testation of men ; it was upon the nature even of God, upon his 
existence, upon the immortality of the soul, upon the true 
felicity. 

Some doubted the whole; others believed that they knew 
every thing. Some denied a God; others gave us one of their 
own fashioning; that is to say, some of them slothful, an indo- 
lent spectator of human things, and tranquilly leaving to chance 
the management of his own work, as a care unworthy of his 
greatness, and incompatible with his conveniency: some others 
made him the slave of fates, and subject to laws which he 
had no hand in imposing upon himself; others again incorpo- 
rated, with the whole universe, the soul of that vast body, and 
composing, as it were, a part of that world which is entirely his 
work. Many others of which I know nothing, for I pretend 
not to recapitulate them all; but as many schools, so many 
were the sentiments upon so essential a point. So many ages, 
so many fresh absurdities upon the immortality and the nature 
of the soul: here, it was an assemblage of atoms; there, a sub- 
tile fire; in another place, a minute and penetrating air; in an- 
other school, a portion of the divinity. Some made it to die 



Serm. XXII.] THE TRUTH OF RELIGION. 393 



with the body: others would have it to have existed before 
the body; some again made it to pass from one body to an- 
other; from man to the horse, from the condition of a rea- 
sonable being to that of animals without reason. There were 
some who taught that the true happiness of man is in the senses; 
a great number placed it in the reason; others again found it 
only in fame and glory; many in sloth and indolence. And 
what is the most deplorable here is, that the existence of God, 
his nature, the immortality of the soul, the destination and the 
happiness of men, all points so essential to his destiny, so de- 
cisive with regard to his eternal misery or happiness, were 
nevertheless become problems, everywhere destined merely to 
amuse the leisure of the schools and the vanity of the sophists; 
idle questions, in which they were never interested for the prin- 
ciple of truth, but solely for the glory of coming off conqueror. 
Great God! it is in this manner that thou sportest with human 
wisdom. 

If from thence we entered into the Christian ages, who could 
enumerate that endless variety of sects which, in all times, hath 
broken the unity, in order to follow strange doctrines? What 
were the abominations of the Gnosticks, the extravagant follies 
of the Valentinians, the fanaticism of Montanus, the contradic- 
tions of the Manicheans? Follow every age: as, in order to 
prove the just, it is necessary that there be heresies. You will 
find that in every age the church hath always been miserably 
rent with them. 

Recal to your remembrance the sad dissensions of only the 
past age. Since the separation of our brethren, what a mon- 
strous variety in their doctrine! What endless sects sprung 
from only one sect ! What numberless particular assemblies in 
one same schism! — O faith! O gift of God! O divine torch, 
which comes to clear up darkness, how necessary art thou to 
man ! O infallible rule, sent from heaven, and given in trust to 
the church of Jesus Christ, always the same in all ages, always 
independent of places, of times, of nations, and of interests, how 
requisite it is that thou served as a check upon the eternal fluc- 
tuations of the human mind ! O pillar of fire, at same time so 
obscure and so luminous, of what importance is it that thou 
always conducted the camp of the Lord, the tabernacle and the 
tents of Israel, through all the perils of the desert, the rocks, 
the temptations, and the dark and unknown paths of this life ! 

For you, my brethren, what instruction should we draw from 
this discourse, and what should I say to you in concluding? 
You say that you have faith; show your faith by your works. 
What shall it avail you to have believed if your manners have, 
belied your belief ? The gospel is yet more the religion of the 
heart than of the mind. That faith which makes Christians is 
not a simple submission of the reason; it is a pious tenderness 
of the soul; it is a continual longing to become like unto Jesus 



394 



DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. [Serm. XXIII. 



Christ; it is an indefatigable application in rooting out from 
ourselves whatever may be inimical to a life of faith. There is 
an unbelief of the heart equally dangerous to salvation as that 
of the mind. A man who obstinately refuses belief, after all 
the proofs of religion, is a monster, whom we contemplate with 
horror; but a Christian who believes, yet lives as though he 
believed not, is a madman, whose folly surpasseth comprehen- 
sion: the one procures his own condemnation like a man des- 
perate; the other, like an indolent one, who tranquilly allows 
himself to be carried down by the waves, and thinks that he is 
thereby saving himself. Make your faith then certain, my 
brethren, by your good works ; and if you shudder at the sole 
name of an impious person, have the same horror of yourselves, 
seeing we are taught by faith that the destiny of the wicked 
Christian shall not be different from his, and that his lot shall 
be the same as that of the unbeliever. Live comfortably to 
what you believe. Such is the faith of the righteous, and the 
only one to which the eternal promises have been made. 



SERMON XXIII. 

DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. 
John vii. 27. 

Howbeit we know this man, whence fie is; but when Christ cometh, no 
man knoweth wlience he is. 

Such is the grand pretext opposed by the unbelief of the Jews 
to the doctrine and to the ministry of Jesus Christ ; doubts upon 
the truth of his mission. We know who thou art, and whence 
thou comest, said they to him; but the Christ whom we expect, 
when he cometh, no man knoweth whence he is. It is far from 
clear, then, that thou art the Messiah promised to our fathers; 
perhaps it is an evil spirit which, through thee operates these 
wonders before our eyes, and imposes upon the credulity of the 
vulgar; so many deceivers have already appeared in Judea, 
who, giving themselves out for the Great Prophet who is to 
come, have seduced the people, and at last drawn down upon 
themselves the punishment due to their imposture. Keep us no 
longer in doubt ; if thou be the Christ, tell us plainly, and in 
such a way as that room shall no longer be left either for doubt 
or for mistake. 



Seem. XXIIL] DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. 395 



I would not dare to say this here, my brethren, were the lan- 
guage of doubts upon faith not become so common now among 
us that precaution is needless in undertaking to confute it: be- 
hold the almost universal pretext employed in the world to 
authorise a life altogether criminal. We everywhere meet with 
sinners who coolly tell us, that they would be converted were 
they well assured that all we tell them of religion were true; 
that perhaps there is nothing after this life; that they have 
doubts and difficulties upon our mysteries, to which they can 
find no satisfactory answer; that after all, the whole appears 
very uncertain; and that, before engaging to follow all the ri- 
gid maxims of the gospel, it would be proper to be well assured 
that our toils shall not be lost. 

Now, my intention at present is not to overthrow unbelief, 
by the grand proofs which establish the truth of the Christian 
faith: setting aside that elsewhere we have already established 
them, it is a subject far too extensive for a discourse, and often 
beyond even the capacity of the majority of those who listen to 
us; it is frequently paying too much deference to the frivolous 
objections of those who give themselves out as freethinkers in 
the world, to employ the gravity of our ministry in refuting 
and overthrowing them. 

We must take a shorter and more easy way, therefore, at 
present. My design is not to enter into the foundation of the 
proofs which render testimony to the truth of faith: I mean 
only to expose the falsity of unbelief : I mean to prove that the 
greatest part of those who call themselves unbelievers, are not 
so; that almost all those sinners who vaunt, and are continually 
alleging to us their doubts, as the only obstacle to their conver- 
sion, have actually none; and that, of all the pretexts employed 
as an excuse for not changing their life, that of doubts upon 
religion, now the most common, is the least true and the least 
sincere. 

It appears surprising at first that I should undertake to 
prove to those who believe to have doubts upon religion, and 
are continually objecting them to us, that they have actually 
none: nevertheless, with a proper knowledge of men, and, 
above all, with a proper attention to the character of those 
who make a boast of doubting, nothing is more easy than 
this conviction. I say to their character, in which are al- 
ways to be found licentiousness, ignorance, and vanity; and 
such are the three usual sources of their doubts: they give the 
credit of them to unbelief, which has scarcely a share in them. 

1st, It is licentiousness which proposes, without daring to 
believe them. First reflection. 

2dly, It is ignorance which adopts, without comprehending 
them. Second reflection. 

Lastly, It is vanity which boasts, without being able to suc- 
ceed in drawing any resource from them. Last reflection. 



396 DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. [Serm. XXIII. 



That is to say, that the greatest part of those who call them- 
selves unbelievers, are licentious enough to wish to be so; too 
ignorant to be so in reality; and, nevertheless, sufficiently vain 
to wish to appear so. Let us unfold these three reflections, now 
become so important among us; and let us overthrow licentious- 
ness rather than unbelief, by laying it open to itself. 

Part I. It must at once be admitted, my brethren, and it is 
melancholy for us that we owe this confession to the truth: it 
must be admitted, I say, that our age and those of our fathers 
have seen real unbelievers. In that depravity of manners in 
which we live, and amid all the scandals which have so long 
afflicted the church, it is not surprising that men have some- 
times been found who have denied the existence of a God; and 
that faith, so weakened in all, should in some be at last wholly 
extinguished. As chosen and extraordinary souls appear in 
every age, whom the Lord filleth with his grace, his lights, and 
his most shining gifts, and upon whom he delighteth in liberally 
pouring forth all the riches of his mercy; so, likewise, are seen 
others in whom iniquity is, as I may say, consummate; and 
whom the Lord seems to have marked out, to display in them 
the most terrible judgments of his justice, and the most fatal 
effects of his neglect and wrath. 

The church, where all these scandals are to increase even to 
the end, cannot therefore boast of being entirely purged from 
the scandal of unbelief: she hath, from time to time, her stars 
which enlighten, and her monsters who disfigure her; and, 
along with those great men, celebrated for their lights and for 
their sanctity, who in every age have served as her support and 
ornament, she hath also witnessed a list of impious men, whose 
names are still at present the horror of the universe, who have 
dared, in writings full of blasphemy and impiety, to attack the 
mysteries of God, to deny salvation and the promises made to 
our fathers, to overturn the foundation of faith, and to preach 
freethinking among believers. 

I do not pretend, therefore, to say, that, among so many 
wretches who speak the language of unbelief among us, there 
may not perhaps be found some one sufficiently corrupted in 
mind and in heart, and so far abandoned by God, as actually 
and in effect to be an unbeliever: I mean only to establish, that 
these men, grounded in impiety, are rare: and that, among all 
those who are continually vaunting their doubts and their un- 
belief, and make a deplorable ostentation of them, there is not 
perhaps a single one upon whose heart faith doth not still pre- 
serve its rights, and who doth not inwardly dread that God 
whom he apparently refuses to acknowledge. To overthrow, 
it is not always necessary to combat our pretended unbelievers; 
it would often be combating only phantoms; they require only 
to be displayed such as they are: the wretched decoration of 



SteRM. XXIII.] DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. 397 



unbelief quickly tumbles down, and nothing remains but their 
passions and their debaucheries. 

And, behold the first reason upon which I have established 
the general proposition, that the majority of those who make a 
boast of their doubts have actually none; it is, that their doubts 
are those of licentiousness and not of unbelief. "Why, my bre- 
thren? Because it is licentiousness which hath formed their 
doubts, and not their doubts licentiousness; because that, in 
fact, it is to their passions and not to their doubts that they 
hold: lastly, because that, in general, they attack in religion 
only those truths inimical to their passions. Behold reflections 
which, in my opinion, are worthy of your attention; I shall lay 
them before you without ornament, and in the same order in 
which they presented themselves to my mind. 

I say, in the first place, because their doubts have sprung from 
licentiousness, and not licentiousness from their doubts. Yes, my 
brethren : not one of all those who afi°ect to profess themselves 
unbelievers has ever been seen to begin by doubts upon the 
truths of faith, and afterwards from doubts to fall into licen- 
tiousness; they begin with the passions; doubts come after- 
wards; they first give way to the irregularities of the age and 
to the excesses of debauchery; and when attained to a certain 
length, and they find it no longer possible to return upon their 
steps, they then say, in order to quiet themselves, that there is 
nothing after this life, or at least they are well pleased to find 
people who say so. It is not, therefore, the little certainty they 
find in religion, which authorises their conclusion that we ought 
to yield ourselves up to pleasure, and that self-denial is needless, 
since every thing dies with us; it is the yielding of themselves 
up to pleasure which creates doubts upon religion, and, by ren- 
dering self-denial next to impossible, leads them to conclude 
that consequently it is needless. Faith becomes suspected only 
when it begins to be troublesome; and to this day unbelief hath 
never made a voluptuary, but voluptuousness hath made almost 
all the unbelievers. 

And a proof of what I say, you whom this discourse regards, 
is, That while you have lived with modesty and innocence, you 
never doubted. Recollect those happy times when the passions 
had not yet corrupted your heart; the faith of your fathers had 
then nothing but what was august and respectable: reason bent 
without pain to the yoke of authority; you never thought of 
doubts or difficulties: from the moment your manners changed, 
your views upon religion have no longer been the same. It is 
not faith, therefore, which hath found new difficulties in your 
reason; it is the practice of duties which hath encountered new 
obstacles in your heart. And, should you tell us, that your first 
impressions, so favourable to faith, sprung solely from the pre- 
judices of education and of childhood; we shall answer, that 
the second, so favourable to impiety, have sprung solely from 



398 DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. [Serm. XXIII. 



the prejudices of the passions and of debauchery; and that, pre- 
judices for prejudices, it appears to us, that it is still better to 
keep by those which are formed in innocence and lead us to 
virtue, than to those which are born in the infancy of the pas- 
sions, and preach up only free-thinking and guilt. 

Thus nothing is more humiliating for unbelief than recalling it 
to its origin; it bears a false name of learning and of light: and 
it is a child of iniquity and of darkness. It is not the strength 
of reason which has led our pretended unbelievers to scepticism; 
it is the weakness of a corrupted heart, which has been unable 
to surmount its infamous passions; it is even a mean coward- 
liness, which, unable to support and to view with a steady eye 
the terrors and the threatenings of religion, endeavours to shake 
off their thought by continually repeating, that they are childish 
terrors: it is a man who, afraid of the night, sings as he goes 
along, to prevent himself from thinking; debauchery always 
makes us cowardly and fearful; and it is nothing but an excess 
of fear of eternal punishments, which occasions a sinner to be 
continually preaching up and singing to us that they are doubt- 
ful; he trembles, and wishes to strengthen himself against him- 
self; he cannot support, at the same time, the view of his crimes 
and that of the punishment which awaits them; that faith, so 
venerable, and of which he speaks with such contempt, never- 
theless terrifies and disquiets him still more than those other 
sinners, who, without doubting its punishments, yet are frequent- 
ly not less unfaithful to its precepts; it is a coward, who hides 
his fear under a false ostentation of bravery. No, my brethren, 
our pretended free-thinkers give themselves out as men of courage 
and firmness; examine them narrowly, and they are the weak- 
est and most cowardly of men. 

Besides, it is not surprising that licentiousness leads us to 
doubt of religion; the passions require the aid of unbelief; for 
they are too feeble and too unreasonable to maintain their own 
cause. Our lights, our feelings, our conscience, all struggle 
within us against them: we are under the necessity, therefore, 
of seeking a support for them, and of defending them against 
ourselves; for, it is a matter of satisfaction to justify to one's 
self whatever is pleasing. We would neither wish that passions 
which are dear to us should be criminal, nor that we should 
continually have to support the interests of our pleasures against 
those of our conscience : we wish tranquilly to enjoy our crimes, 
and to free ourselves from that troublesome monitor which con- 
tinually espouses the cause of virtue against ourselves: while 
remorses contest the pleasure of our enjoyments, they must be 
very imperfectly tasted; it is paying too great a price for guilt, to 
purchase it at the expense of that quiet which is sought in it: we 
must either terminate our debaucheries, or try to quiet ourselves 
in them; and as it is impossible to enjoy peace of mind in them, 
and next to impossible to terminate them, the only refuge seems 



Serm. XXIIL] DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. 



399 



that of doubting the truths which disquiet us; and, in order to 
attain to tranquillity, every effort is used to inculcate the per- 
suasion of unbelief. 

That is to say, that the great effort of licentiousness is that 
of leading us to the desire of unbelief; the horrible security of 
the unbeliever is coveted; total hardness of heart is considered 
as a happy state; it is unpleasant to have been born with a 
weaker and more fearful conscience; the lot of those, apparent- 
ly firm and unshaken in impiety, is envied: while they, in their 
turn, perhaps a prey to the most gloomy remorses, and vaunting 
a courage they are far from having, view our lot with envy; for, 
judging of us from the language we hold upon free-thinking, 
they take us for what we take them; that is to say, for what we 
are not, and for what both they and we would wish to be. And 
it is thus, O my God ! that these false heroes of impiety live in 
a perpetual illusion, continually deceive themselves, and appear 
what they are not, only because they would wish to be it: they 
would willingly have religion to be but a dream: they say in 
their heart, " There is no God;" that is to say, this impious 
language is the desire of their heart; they would ardently wish 
no God; that that Being, so grand and so necessary, were a 
chimera; that they were the sole masters of their own destiny; 
that they were accountable only to themselves for the horrors of 
their life and the infamy of their passions : that all finished with 
them; and that, beyond the grave, there were no supreme and 
eternal Judge, the punisher of vice and the rewarder of virtue : 
they wish it; they destroy as much as they can, through the 
impious wishes of their heart, but they cannot efface from the 
foundation of their being, the idea of his power and the dread of 
his punishments. 

In effect, it would be too vulgar for a man, vain and plunged in 
debauchery, inwardly to say to himself: I am still too weak, and 
too much abandoned to pleasure, to quit it, or to lead a more regu- 
lar and Christian life. That pretext would still leave all his re- 
morses. It is much sooner done to say to himself, It is needless to 
live otherwise, for there is nothing after this life. This pretext is 
far more convenient, for it puts an end to every thing; it is the 
most favourable to indolence, for it estranges us from the sacra- 
ments, and from all the other slaveries of religion. It is much 
shorter to say to himself, " There is nothing," and to live as if 
he were in effect persuaded of it; it is at once throwing off every 
yoke and all restraint; it puts an end to all the irksome mea- 
sures which sinners of another description still guard with reli- 
gion and with the conscience. This pretext of unbelief, by 
persuading us that we actually doubt, leaves us in a certain state 
of indolence on every thing regarding religion, which prevents us 
from searching into ourselves, and from making too melancholy 
reflections on our passions : we meanly allow ourselves to be 
swept away by the fatal course, upon the general prepossession 



400 



DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. [Serm. XXIII. 



that we believe nothing; we have few remorses, for we think 
ourselves unbelievers, and because that supposition leaves us 
almost the same security as impiety: at least, it is a diversion 
which dulls and suspends the sensibility of the conscience; and, 
by operating so as to make us always take ourselves for what 
we are not, it induces us to live as if we actually were what we 
wish to be. 

That is to say, that the greatest part of these pretended free- 
thinkers, and of those debauched and licentious unbelievers, 
ought to be considered as weak and dissolute men, who, not 
having the force to live christianly, nor even the hardness to be 
atheists, remain in that state of estrangement from religion, as 
the most convenient to indolence; and, as they never try to quit 
it, they fancy that they actually hold to it: it is a kind of neu- 
trality betwixt faith and irreligion, contrived by indolence for 
its own ease; for it requires exertion to adopt a side; and, in 
order to remain neuter, nothing more is required than not to 
think, and to live by habit; thus they never fathom, nor take 
any resolution upon themselves. Hardened and avowed impiety 
hath something, I know not what, which strikes with horror: 
religion, on the other hand, presents objects which alarm and 
are by no means convenient to the passions. What is to be 
done in these two extremities, of which the one shocks reason, 
and the other the senses? They rest wavering and undecided; 
in the mean time they enjoy the calm which is left by that state 
of indecision and indifference : they live without wishing to know 
what they are; for it is much more convenient to be nothing, 
and to live without thinking, or any knowledge of themselves. 
No, my brethren, I repeat it; these are not unbelievers, they 
are cowards, who have not the courage to espouse a side; who 
know only to live voluptuously, without rule, without morality, 
and often without decency; and who, without being atheists, 
live however without religion, for religion requires consistency, 
reason, elevation of mind, firmness, noble sentiments; and of all 
these they are incapable. Such, however, are the heroes of 
whom impiety boasts; behold the suffrages upon which it 
grounds its defence, and opposes to religion, by insulting us; 
behold the partisans with whom it thinks itself invincible; and 
weak and wretched must its resources indeed be, since it is re- 
duced to seek them in men of this description. 

First reason, which proves that licentiousness springs not 
from doubts, but doubts from licentiousness. The second rea- 
son is only a fresh proof of the first; it is that actually, if they 
do not change their life, it is not to their doubts, but solely to 
their passions that they hold. 

For I ask nothing of you here but candour, you who conti- 
nually allege your doubts upon our mysteries. When you some- 
times think of quitting that sink of vice and debauchery in which 
you live, and when the passions, more tranquil, allow you to re- 



Serm. XXIIL] DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. 401 



fleet, do you then oppose your uncertainties upon religion? Do 
you say to yourselves, " But if I return, it will be necessary to 
believe things which seem incredible?" Is this the grand diffi- 
culty? Ah! you inwardly say, But if I return, it will be neces- 
sary to break off this connexion, to deny myself these excesses, 
to terminate these societies, to shun these places, to proceed to 
things which I shall never support, and to adopt a manner of 
life to which all my inclinations are repugnant. These are 
what check you; these are the wall of separation which removes 
you from God. You speak so much to others of your doubts; 
how comes it that you never speak of them to yourselves? This 
is not a matter, therefore, of reason and of belief; it is a matter 
of the heart and of licentiousness; and the delay of your con- 
version springs not from your uncertainties upon faith, but from 
the sole doubt in which the violence and the empire of your pas- 
sions leave you of ever being able to free yourselves from their 
subjection and infamy. Such, my brethren, are the true chains 
which bind our pretended unbelievers to their own wretched- 
ness. 

And this truth is more evident from this, that the majority 
of those who profess themselves unbelievers, live, nevertheless, 
in perpetual variations upon the point even of unbelief. In cer- 
tain moments they are affected with the truths of religion: they 
feel themselves torn with the keenest remorses; they even apply 
to the servants of God most distinguished for their learning and 
piety, to hold converse with and receive instructions from them: 
in others, they make game of these truths; they treat the ser- 
vants of God with derision, and piety itself as a chimera: there 
is scarcely one of these sinners, even of those who make the 
greatest ostentation of their unbelief, whom the spectacle of an 
unexpected death, a fatal accident, a greivous loss, or a reverse 
of fortune, hath not cast into gloomy reflections on his situation, 
and excited desires of a more Christian life : there is hardly one 
who, in these trying situations, seeks not consolation in the sup- 
port of the godly, and takes not some step which leaves hopes of 
amendment. It is not to their companions in impiety and li- 
centiousness that they then have recourse for consolation; it is 
not by those impious railleries upon our mysteries, and by that 
horrible philosophy that they try to alleviate their sufferings: 
these are discourses of festivity and dissipation, and not of af- 
fliction and sorrow: it is the religion of the table, of pleasures, 
of riotings; it is not that of solemn adversity and sadness: the 
relish of impiety vanishes with that of pleasures. Now, if their 
unbelief were founded in real uncertainties upon religion, so 
long as these uncertainties existed unbelief should be the same; 
but, as their doubts spring only from their passions, and as their 
passions are not always the same, nor equally violent and mas- 
ters of their heart, so their doubts continually fluctuate like their 
passions; they increase, they diminish, they are eclipsed, they 

C c 



402 



DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. [Serm. XXIII. 



re-appear, they are mutable, exactly in the same degree as their 
passions. In a word, they share the lot of the passions, for they 
are nothing but the passions themselves. 

In effect, to leave nothing unsaid on this subject, and to make 
you thoroughly feel how much this vaunted profession of unbe- 
lief is despicable, observe this: Reply to every difficulty of the 
boasting sinner, reduce him to have nothing more to say, and 
yet still he does not yield; you have not thereby gained him; 
he retires within himself, as if he had still more overpowering 
reasons which he disdains to bring forward: he keeps firm, and 
opposes a mysterious and decisive air to all those proofs which 
he cannot resolve. You then pity his madness and obstinacy: 
you are mistaken; be touched only for his libertine life, and his 
want of candour; for, let a mortal disease strike him on quit- 
ting you; approach his bed of anguish, ah ! you will find this 
pretended unbeliever convinced; his doubts cease, his uncer- 
tainties end, all that deplorable display of unbelief vanishes and 
tumbles in pieces; there is no longer even question of it: he 
has resource to the God of his fathers, and trembles, at the judg- 
ments he made a show of not believing. The minister of Jesus 
Christ, called in, has no occasion to enter into controversy to 
undeceive him on his impiety: the dying sinner anticipates his 
cares and his ministry: he is ashamed of his past blasphemies, 
and repents of them: he acknowledges their falsity and decep- 
tion; he makes a public reparation of them to the majesty and 
to the truth of religion; he no longer demands proofs, he asks 
only consolations. Nevertheless, this disease hath not brought 
new lights upon faith; the blow which strikes his flesh hath not 
cleared up the doubts of his mind; ah ! it is because it touches 
his heart, and terminates his riots; in a word, it is that his 
doubts were in his passions, and that whatever tends to extin- 
guish his passions, tends, at the same time, to extinguish his 
doubts. 

It happens, I confess, that sinners are sometimes found, who 
push their madness and impiety even to that last moment: who 
expire in vomiting forth, with their impious souls, blasphemies 
against the God who is to judge them, and whom they refuse to 
acknowledge. For, O my God ! thou art terrible in thy judg- 
ments, and sometimes permittest that the athiest die in his im- 
piety. But such examples are rare; and you well know, my 
brethren, that an entire age scarcely furnishes one of these shock- 
ing spectacles. But view, in that last moment, all the others 
who vaunted their unbelief; see a sinner on the bed of death, 
who had hitherto appeared the firmest in impiety, and the most 
resolute in denying all belief; he even anticipates the proposal 
of having resource to the church remedies : he lifts up his hands 
to heaven, and gives striking and sincere marks of a religion 
which was never effaced from the bottom of his heart: he no 
longer rejects, as childish bugbears, the threatenings and chas- 



Serm. XXIII.] DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. 403 



tisenients of a future life: What do I say? this sinner, formerly 
so firm, so stately in his pretended unbelief, so much above the 
vulgar fears, then becomes weaker, more fearful, and more cre- 
dulous, than the lowest of the people; his fears are more ex- 
cessive, his very religion more superstitious, his practices of 
worship more silly, and more extravagant than those of the vul- 
gar; and, as one excess borders on its opposite excess, he is seen 
to pass in a moment from impiety to superstition; from the 
firmness of the philosopher to all the weakness of the ignorant 
and simple. 

And here it is, that, with Tertullian, I would appeal to this 
dying sinner, and let him hold forth, in my stead, against un- 
belief; it is here that, to the honour of the religion of our fathers, 
I would wish no other testimony of the weakness and of the in- 
sincerity of the pretended atheist, than this expiring soul, who, 
surely now, can speak only the language of truth; it is here 
that I would assemble all unbelievers around his bed of death; 
and, to overthrow them by a testimony which could not be sus- 
picious, would say to him, with Tertullian: " O soul! be- 
fore thou quittest this earthly body, which thou art so soon to 
be freed from, suffer me to call upon thy testimony: speak, in 
this last moment, when vanity is no more, and thou owest all to 
the truth: say, if thou considerest the terrible God, into whose 
hands thou goest, as a chimerical being with whom weak and 
credulous minds are alarmed? Say, if, all now disappearing 
from thine eyes, if, for thee, all creatures returning to nothing, 
God alone doth not appear to thee immortal, unchangeable, the 
being of all ages and of eternity, and who filleth the heavens and 
the earth? We now consent, we, whom thou hast always con- 
sidered as superstitious and vulgar minds, we consent that thou 
judge betwixt us and unbelief, to which thou hast ever been 
so partial. Though, with regard to faith, thou hast hitherto 
been as a stranger and the enemy of religion, religion refers its 
cause to thee, against those with whom the shocking tie of im- 
piety had so closely united thee. If all die with thee, why does 
death appear so dreadful? Why these uplifted hands to hea- 
ven, if there be no God who may listen to thy prayers and be 
touched by thy groanings? If nothing thyself, why belie the 
nothingness of thy being, and why tremble upon the sequel of 
thy destiny? Whence come, in this last moment, these feelings 
of dread and of respect for the Supreme Being? Is it not, that 
they have ever been in thee, that thou hast imposed upon the 
public by a false ostentation of impiety, and that death only un- 
folds those dispositions of faith and of religion, which, though 
dormant, have never ceased during life." 

Yes, my brethren, could the passions be destroyed, all unbe- 
lievers would soon be recalled; and a final reason, which fully 
proves it, is that, if they seem to rise up against the incompre- 
hensibility of our mysteries, it is solely for the purpose of com- 



1 



404 DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. [Serm. XXIII. 



bating what touches them, and of attacking the truths which 
interest the passions"; that is to say, the truth of a future state, 
and the eternity of future punishments; this is always the fa- 
vourite conclusion and fruit of their doubts. 

In effect, if religion, without adding maxims and truths which 
restrain the passions, proposed only mysteries which exceed rea- 
son, we may boldly say, that unbelievers would be rare; almost 
no one is interested in those abstruse truths or errors, which it is 
inclifferent to believe or to deny. You will find few real vota- 
ries of truth who become partisans and zealots in support of 
merely speculative and unimportant points, because they believe 
them to be true. The abstruse truths of mathematics have 
found, in our days, some zealous and estimable followers, who 
have devoted themselves to the elucidation of what is held as 
most impenetrable in the infinite secrets and profound obscuri- 
ties of that science; but these are rare and singular men; the 
infection was little to be dreaded, nor, in truth, has it spread; 
they are admired, but few would wish to follow their example. 
If religion proposed only truths equally abstruse, equally indif- 
ferent to the felicity of the senses, equally uninteresting to the 
passions and to self-love, the atheists would be still more rare 
than the mathematicians. The truths of religion are objected 
to, merely because they threaten us: no objections are made to 
the others, because their truth or their falsity is alike indifferent. 

And tell us not that it is not through self-interest, but the sole 
love of truth, that the unbeliever rejects mysteries which reason 
rejects. This, I well know, is the boast of the pretended unbe- 
liever, and he would wish us to think so; but of what conse- 
quence is the- truth to men, who, so far from either seeking, 
loving, or knowing it, ivish even to conceal it from themselves? 
What matters to them a truth beyond their reach, and to which 
they have never devoted a single serious moment; which, hav- 
ing nothing nattering to the passions, can never be interesting 
to these men of flesh and blood, plunged in a voluptuous life? 
Their object is to gratify their irregular desires, and yet have 
nothing to dread after this life; this is the only truth which in- 
terests them: give up that point, and the obscurity of all the 
other mysteries will not occupy even a thought; let them but 
tranquilly enjoy their crimes, and they will agree to every thing. 

Thus the majority of atheists, who have left in writing the 
wretched fruits of their impiety, have always striven to prove 
there was nothing above us; that all died with the body, and that 
future punishments or rewards were fables; to attract followers 
it was necessary to secure the suffrage of the passions. If ever 
they attacked the other points of religion, it was only to come 
to the main conclusion, that there is nothing after this life; 
that vices or virtues are names invented by policy to restrain 
the people; and that the passions are only natural and innocent 



Serm. XXIII.] DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. 



405 



inclinations, which every one may follow, because every one finds 
them in himself. 

Behold why the impious, in the Book of Wisdom, the Sad- 
ducees themselves, in the gospel, who may be considered as the 
fathers and predecessors of our unbelievers, never took any pains 
to refute the truth of the miracles related in the books of Mo- 
ses, and which God formerly wrought in favour of his people, 
nor the promise of the Mediator made to their fathers: they 
attacked only the resurrection of the dead, and the immortality 
of the soul: that point decided every thing for therm " Man 
dies like the beast," said they in the Book of Wisdom; " we 
know not if their nature be different, but their end and their lot 
are the same: trouble us no more, therefore, with a futurity 
which is not; let us enjoy life: let us refuse ourselves no grati- 
fication: time is short; let us hasten to live, for we shall die 
to-morrow, and because all shall die with us." No, my brethren, 
unbelief hath always originated in the passions: the yoke of faith 
is never rejected but in order to shake off the yoke of duties; 
and religion would never have an enemy, were it not the enemy 
of licentiousness and vice. 

But, if the doubts of our unbelievers are not real, in conse- 
quence of being formed solely by licentiousness, they are also 
false, because it is ignorance which adopts without comprehend- 
ing them, and vanity which makes a boast without being able 
to make a resource of them: this is what now remains to me to 
unfold. 

Part II. The same answer might be made to the majority of 
those who are continually vaunting their doubts upon religion, 
and find nothing but contradictions in what faith obliges us 
to believe, that Tertullian formerly made to the heathens upon 
all the reproaches they invented against the mysteries and the 
doctrine of Jesus Christ. They condemn, said he, what they 
do not understand : they blame what they have never examined, 
and what they know only by hearsay; they blaspheme what 
they are ignorant of, and they are ignorant of it because they 
hate it too much to give themselves the trouble of searching into 
and knowing it. Now, continues this father, nothing is more 
indecent and foolish than boldly to decide upon what they know 
not; and all that religion would reqiiire of these frivolous and 
dissolute men, who so warmly rise up against it, is not to con- 
demn before they are well acquainted with it. 

Such, my brethren, is the situation of almost all who give 
themselves out in the world as unbelievers; they have investi- 
gated neither the difficulties nor the respectable proofs of reli- 
gion; they know not even enough to doubt of them. They 
hate it; for how is it possible to love our condemnation? And 
upon that hatred are founded their doubts and their only argu- 
ments to oppose it. 



406 DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. [Seum. XXIIL 



In effect, when I glance my eye over all that the Christian 
ages have had of great men, elevated geniuses, profound and en- 
lightened scholars, who, after an entire life of study and indefa- 
tigable application, have, with a humble docility, submitted to the 
mysteries of faith; have found the proofs of religion so strong, 
that the proudest and most untractable reason might, in their 
opinion, without derogation, comply; have defended it against 
the blasphemies of the pagans; have silenced the vain philoso- 
phy of the sages of the age, and made the folly of the cross to 
triumph over all the wisdom and erudition of Rome and Athens; 
it strikes me, that, in order to renew the attack against myste- 
ries so long and so universally established; that, in order to be 
heard in appeal, if I may venture to say so, from the submission 
of so many ages, from the writings of so many great men, from 
so many victories achieved by faith, from the consent of the 
universe; in a word, from a prescription so long and so well 
strengthened, it would require either new proofs that had never 
yet been controverted, or new difficulties that had never yet been 
started, or new methods which discovered a weak side in reli- 
gion as yet never found out. It seems to me, that, singly to rise 
up against so many testimonies, so many prodigies, so many 
ages, so many divine monuments, so many famous personages, 
so many works which time hath consecrated, and which, like pure 
gold, have quitted the ordeal of unbelief only more resplendent and 
immortal; in a word, so many surprising, and till then unheard 
of events, which establish the faith of Christians, it would re- 
quire very decisive and very evident reasons, very rare and new 
lights, to pretend even to doubt, much less to oppose it. Would 
not that man be as deservedly considered out of his senses, who 
should go to defy a whole army, merely to make an ostentation 
of a vain defiance, and to pride himself upon a burlesque bra- 
very? 

Nevertheless, when you examine the majority of those who 
call themselves unbelievers, who are continually clamouring 
against the popular prejudices, who vaunt their doubts, and 
defy us to satisfy or to answer them; you find that their only 
knowledge consists of some hackneyed and vulgar doubts, which, 
in all times, have been, and still continue to be, argued in the 
world: that they know nothing but a certain jargon of licen- 
tiousness which goes from hand to hand, which they receive 
without examination, and repeat without understanding: you 
find that their whole skill and study of religion are reduced to 
some licentious sayings, which, if I may descend so low, are 
the proper language of the streets; to certain maxims which, 
through mere repitition, begin to relish of proverbial meanness. 
You will find no foundation, no principle, no sequence of doctrine, 
no knowledge even of the religion which they attack; they are 
men immersed in pleasure, and who would be very sorry to 
have a spare moment to devote to the investigation of wearisome 



Serm. XXIII.] DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. 40*- 



truths which they are indifferent whether they know or not; 
men of a light and superficial character, and wholly unfitted for 
a moment's serious meditation or investigation; let me again re- 
peat, men drowned in voluptuousness, and in whom even that 
portion of penetration and understanding, accorded hy nature, 
hath heen debased and extinguished by debauchery. 

Such are the formidable supports of unbelief against the know- 
ledge of God; behold the frivolous, dissipated and ignorant 
characters who dare to tax, with credulity and ignorance, all 
that the Christian ages have had, and still have of learned, able, 
and celebrated personages; they know the language of doubts; 
but they have learned it by rote, for they have never formed 
them; they only repeat what they have heard: it is a tradition 
of ignorance and impiety: they have no doubts; they only pre- 
serve, for those to come, the language of irreligion and doubts; 
they are not unbelievers, they are only the echoes of unbelief ; 
in a word, they know how to express a doubt, but they are too 
ignorant to doubt themselves. 

And a proof of what I advance is, that, in all other doubts, 
we hesitate only in order to be instructed; every thing is ex- 
amined which can elucidate the concealed truth. But here the 
doubt is merely for doubting's sake; a proof that we are equal- 
lv uninterested in the doubt as in the truth which conceals it 
from us; they would be very sorry were they under the neces- 
sity of clearing up either the falsity or the truth of uncertainties 
which they pretend to have on our mysteries. Yes, my brethren, 
were the punishment of doubters to be that of an indispensable 
obligation to seek the truth, no one would doubt; no one would 
purchase, at such a price, the pleasure of calling himself an un- 
believer; few indeed would be capable of it; decisive proof that 
they do not doubt, and that they are as little attached to their 
doubts, as to religion (for their knowledge in both is much about 
the same) ; but only that they have lost those first feelings of 
discretion and of faith which left us still some vestige of respect 
for the religion of our fathers. Thus, it is doing too much 
honour to men, so worthy both of pity and contempt, to sup- 
pose that they have taken a side, that they have embraced a 
system; you honour them too much by ranking them among 
the impious followers of a Socinus, by ennobling them with the 
shocking titles of deists or atheists: alas! they are nothing; 
they are of no system; at least, they neither know themselves 
what they are, nor can they tell us what that system is; and, 
strange as it may appear, they have found out the secret of 
forming a state more despicable, more mean, and more unworthy 
of reason, than even that of impiety; and it is even doing them 
credit to call them by the shocking title of unbeliever, which 
had hitherto been considered as the shame of humanity and the 
highest reproach of men. 

And, to conclude this article with a reflection which confirms. 



408 DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. [St km. XXIII. 



the same truth, and is very humiliating for our pretended un- 
believers, I observe that they who affect to treat us as weak and 
credulous minds, who vaunt their reason, who accuse us of 
grounding a religion upon the popular prejudices, and of believ- 
ing solely because our predecessors have believed; they, I say. 
are unbelievers, and doubt upon the sole and deplorable autho- 
rity of a debauchee, whom they have often heard to say that 
futurity is a bugbear, and made use of as a scarecrow to frighten 
only children and the common people; such is their only know- 
ledge and their only use of reason. They are impious, as tliey 
accuse us of being believers without examination, and through 
credulousness, but through a credulity which can find no excuse 
but in madness and folly; the authority of a single impious dis- 
course, pronounced in a bold and decisive tone, hath subjugated 
their reason, and ranked them in the lists of impiety. They 
call us credulous, in yielding to the authority of the prophets, 
of the apostles, of men inspired by God, of the shining miracles 
wrought to establish the truth of our mysteries, and to that 
venerable tradition of holy pastors, who, from age to age, have 
transmitted to us the charge of doctrine and of truth, that is to 
say, to the greatest authority that hath ever been on the earth : 
and they think themselves less credulous, and it appears to them 
more worthy of reason, to submit to the authority of a free- 
thinker, who, in a moment of debauchery, pronounces, with a 
firm tone, that there is no God, yet most likely inwardly belies 
his own words! — Ah! my brethren, how much does man de- 
grade and render himself contemptible when he arrogates a false 
glory from being no longer in the belief of a God. 

Thus, why is it, think you, that our pretended unbelievers 
are so desirous of seeing real atheists confirmed in impiety; that 
they seek and entice them even from foreign countries, like a 
Spinosa, if the fact be, that he was called into France to be 
heard and consulted? It is because our unbelievers are not firm 
m unbelief, nor can they find any who are so; and, in order to 
harden themselves, they would gladly see some one actually 
confirmed in that destestable cause; they seek, in precedent, re- 
sources and defences against their own conscience; and, not 
daring of themselves to become impious, they expect from an 
example what their reason and even their heart refuses : and, 
in so doing, they surely fall into a credulity much more childish 
and absurd than that with which they reproach believers. A 
Spinosa, that monster, who, after embracing ruinous religions, 
ended with none, was most anxious to find out some professed 
freethinker who might confirm him in the cause of irreligion 
and atheism: he formed to himself that impenetrable chaos of 
impiety, that work of confusion and darkness in which the sole 
desire of not believing in God can support the weariness and 
disgust of those who read it; in which, excepting the impiety, 
all is unintelligible, and which would, from its birth, have sunk 



Serm. XXIIL] DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. 



409 



into oblivion, had it not, to the shame of humanity, attacked 
the Supreme Being: that impious wretch, I say, lived concealed, 
retired, tranquil: his dark productions were his only occupa- 
tion, and, to harden himself, he needed only himself. But those 
who so eagerly sought him, who longed to consult and see him, 
those frivolous and dissolute men were fools who wished to be- 
come impious : and who, not finding sufficient authority to re- 
main believers in the testimony of all ages, of all nations, and 
of all the great men who have honoured religion, sought, in the 
single testimony of an obscure individual, of a deserter from 
every religion, of a monster obliged to hide himself from the 
eyes of men, a deplorable and monstrous authority which might 
confirm them in impiety, and defend them from their own con- 
science. Great God? let the impious here hide their faces; let 
them cease to make an ostentation of an unbelief which is the 
fruit of their depravity and ignorance, and no longer speak, but 
with blushes, of the submission of believers : it is all a language 
of deceit; they give to vanity what we give to truth. 

I say vanity; and this is the grand and final reason which 
more clearly exposes all the falsity and weakness of unbelief. 
Yes, my brethren, all our pretended unbelievers are bullies, who 
give themselves out for what they are not; they consider unbe- 
lief as conveying the idea of something above the common; 
they are continually boasting that they believe nothing, and, by 
dint of boasting, they at last persuade themselves of it: like 
certain mushroom characters among us, who though touching 
the obscurity and vulgarity of their ancestors, have the deplor- 
able vanity of wishing to be thought of an illustrious birth and 
descended from the greatest names; by dint of blazoning and 
repeating it, they attain almost to the belief of it themselves. 
It is the same with our pretended unbelievers; they still touch, 
as I may say, that faith which they have received at their birth, 
which still flows with their blood, and is not yet effaced from 
their heart; but they think it a vulgarity and meanness, at 
which they blush; by dint of saying and boasting that they be- 
lieve nothing, they are convinced that they really do not believe, 
and have consequently a much higher opinion of themselves. 

1st, Because that deplorable profession of unbelief supposes 
an uncommon understanding, strength and superiority of mind, 
and a singularity which is pleasing and flattering; on the con- 
trary, that the passions infer only licentiousness and debauchery 
of which all men are capable, though they are not so of that 
wonderful superiority attributed to itself by impiety. 

2dly, Because faith is so weakened in our age that we find 
few in the world who pique themselves upon wit and a little 
more knowledge or erudition than others, who do not allow 
themselves doubts and difficulties upon the most august and 
most sacred parts of religion. It would be a disgrace, therefore, 
in their company to appear religious and believers; they are 



410 



DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. [Serm. XXIII. 



men high in the public esteem, and any resemblance to them is 
nattering; in adopting their language, their talents and reputa- 
tion are thought likewise to be adopted; and not to dare to fol- 
low or to copy them would, it seems, be making a public avowal 
of weakness a ud mediocrity; miserable and childish vanity! 
Besides, because they have heard say that certain characters, 
distinguished in their age, did not believe, and as the memory 
of their talents and great actions has been preserved only with 
that of their irreligion, they vaunt these grand examples; after 
such illustrious models, it appears dignified to believe nothing; 
their names are constantly in their mouths: it is a false em- 
broidery, where a laughable vanity and littleness of mind alone 
are conspicuous, since nothing can be more miserable or mean 
than to give ourselves out for what we are not, or to assume the 
personage of another. 

3dly, and lastly, Because the language of impiety is in general 
the consequence of licentious society: we wish to appear the 
same as our companions in debauchery; for it would be a shame 
to be dissolute, and yet seem to believe, in the very presence of 
our accomplices in riot. It is a sorry cause that of a debauchee 
who still believes; impiety and licentiousness are the only colour 
for debauchery; without these he would only be a novice in pro- 
fligacy; the dread of punishments and of a hell is left to those 
yet unexercised in s guilt; that remnant of religion seems to savour 
too much of childhood and the college. But when attained to 
a certain length in debauchery, ah! those vulgar weaknesses 
must all be soared above; their opinion of themselves is raised 
in proportion as they can persuade others that they are now 
above all these fears; they even mock those who appear still to 
dread: like the wife of Job, they say, with a tone of irony and 
impiety, " Dost thou still retain thine integrity? Art thou so 
simple as to believe all these tales with which thy childhood 
hath been alarmed? Thou seest not that all these are merely 
the visions of weak minds, and that the more knowing, who 
preach them up so much, believe not a word of them them- 
selves !" 

O my God ! how mean and despicable is the impious man, 
who seems so proudly to contemn thee? He is a coward, who 
outwardly insults, yet inwardly fears thee; he is a vain boaster, 
who makes a show of unbelief, but tells not what passes within; 
he is an impostor, who, wishing to deceive us, cannot succeed 
in deceiving himself; he is a fool, who without a single induce- 
ment, adopts all the horror of impiety; he is a madman, who, 
unable to attain irreligion, or to extinguish the terrors of his 
conscience, extinguishes in himself all modesty and decency, and 
endeavours to make an impious merit of it in the eyes of men ; 
who madly sacrifices, to the deplorable vanity of being thought 
an unbeliever, his religion which he still preserves, his God 
whom he dreads, his conscience which he feels, his eternal sal- 



Serm. XXIIL] DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. 411 



vation which he hopes. What a desertion of God, and what a 
sink of madness and folly ! 

And could you, my brethren, (and in this wish I comprise the 
whole fruit of this discourse,) who still feel a reverence for the 
religion of our fathers, but be sensible of the contemptibility of 
those men who give themselves out as freethinkers, and whom 
you often so much esteem; you would then comprehend how 
much the profession of unbelief, now so fashionable among us, 
is, of all other characters, the most frivolous, cowardly, and 
worthy of laughter; you would then know that every thing 
mean and shameful, even according to the world, is concealed 
under this ostentation of impiety, which the corruption of our 
manners hath now rendered so common even to both sexes. 

1st, of licentiousness. They reach the avowal of impiety 
only when the heart is profoundly corrupted; when they ac- 
tually live in private in the most shameful debauchery; and, 
were they known for what they are, they would for ever be 
dishonoured even in the eyes of men. 

2dly, of meanness. They act the philosopher and the wit, 
while in secret, they are the most sneaking, the most dissolute, 
the most abandoned, and weakest of sinners, the veriest slaves 
of every passion, unworthy of modesty, and even of reason. 

3dly, Of deceit and imposition. They act a borrowed cha- 
racter; they give themselves out for what they are not; and, 
while so loudly exclaiming against the godly, and treating them 
as impostors and hypocrites, they are themselves the very cheat 
they decry, and the hypocrite of impiety and freethinking. 

4thly, Of ostentation and wretched vanity. They act the 
hero, while inwardly trembling; for, on the first signal of death, 
they betray more cowardice than even the commonest of the 
people: they make a show of openly insulting that God whom 
they still inwardly dread and even hope to render favourable 
one day to themselves: a character of childishness and buffoon- 
ery which the world itself hath always considered as the lowest, 
the vilest, and the most risible of all characters. 

5thly, Of temerity. Without erudition or knowledge, they 
dare to set up as deciders upon what they are totally ignorant 
of; to condemn the greatest characters of every age; and to 
decide upon important points to which they have never given, 
and, indeed, to which they are incapable of giving, a single mo- 
ment of serious attention: an indecency of character which can 
accord only with men who have nothing more to lose on the 
side of honour. 

6thly, Of folly. They pride themselves in appearing without 
religion; that is to say, without character, morals, probity, fear 
of God and of man, and capable of every thing excepting virtue 
and innocence. 

7thly, Of superstition. We have seen these pretended free- 
thinkers, who refuse to consult the oracles of the holy prophets. 



412 DOUBTS UPON RELIGION. [Serm. XXIII. 



consulting conjurors; admitting in men that knowledge of fu- 
turity which they refuse to God; giving in to every childish 
credulity, while rising up against the majesty of faith; expect- 
ing their aggrandisement and fortune from a deceitful oracle, 
and unwilling to hope their salvation from the oracles of our 
holy books; and, in a word, ridiculously believing in demons, 
while they make a boast of disbelieving in God. 

Lastly, What, in my opinion, is most deplorable in these cha- 
racters is, that they are in a situation which precludes almost 
every hope of salvation. For an actual unbeliever, if such there 
be, may in a moment be stricken of God, and overwhelmed, as 
it were, under the weight of that glory and majesty which he un- 
knowingly had blasphemed: the eyes of this unfortunate wretch 
may still be opened by the Lord in his mercy; he may make 
his light to shine through his darkness, and reveal that truth 
which he resists only because he knows it not: he has still re- 
sources, such as perhaps rectitude, consistency, principles, (of 
error and illusion I confess, but still they are principles:) he 
will be equally warm for his God when known, as he was his 
enemy when unknown. But the unbelievers, of whom I speak, 
have scarcely a way left of returning to God; they insult the 
Lord whom they know; they blaspheme that religion which 
they still preserve in their heart; they resist the impressions of 
conscience, which still inwardly espouses the cause of faith 
against themselves; in vain does the light of God shine upon 
their heart, it serves only to render more inexcusable the treach- 
ery of their impiety. Were they, saith Jesus Christ, absolutely 
blind, they would be worthy of pity, and their sin would be 
less: but at present they see, and consequently the guilt of their 
irreligion is blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which dwelleth 
for ever upon their head. 

Let us repair then, my brethren, by our respect for the reli- 
gion of our fathers; by a continual gratitude towards the Lord, 
who hath permitted us to be born in the way of salvation, into 
which so many nations have not as yet been deemed worthy to 
enter: let us repair, I say, the scandal of unbelief so common 
in this age, so countenanced among us, and which, become more 
bold through the number and quality of its partisans, no longer 
hides its head, but openly shows itself, and braves, as it were, 
the religion of the prince and the zeal of the pastors. Let us 
have in horror those impious and despicable men, who pride 
themselves in turning into ridicule the majesty of the religion 
they profess: let us fly then as monsters unworthy to live, not 
only among believers, but even among those connected together 
by honour, probity, and reason; far from applauding their im- 
pious discourses, let us cover them with shame by that contempt 
which they merit. It is so low and so mean, even according to 
the world, to dishonour that religion in which one lives; it is 
so beautiful, and there is so much real dignity in making a pride 



Serm. XXIV.] EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. 41S 



of respecting and of defending it, even with an air of authority 
and of indignation, against the silly speeches which attack it. 
By despising unhelief, let us deprive it of the deplorable glory 
it seeks; from the moment they are despised, unbelievers will 
be rare among us; and the same vanity which forms their 
doubts will soon annihilate or conceal them, when it shall be a 
disgrace among us to appear impious, and a glory to be a be- 
liever. It is thus that this scandal shall be done away, and that 
altogether we shall glorify the Lord in the same faith, and in 
the expectation of the eternal promises. Amen. 



SERMON XXIV. 

EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. 

John viii. 46. 

And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me. 

Jesus Christ had hitherto confuted the incredulity of the 
Jews by his works and by his miracles; at present he recalls 
them to the judgment of their own conscience and to the evi- 
dence of the truth, which, in spite of themselves, rendered tes- 
timony to his doctrine and to his ministry. Nevertheless, as 
they shut their eyes against the evidence of his miracles, in ac- 
cusing him of operating them through the ministry of devils, 
so they likewise harden themselves against the evidence of his 
doctrine and of his mission, so clearly foretold in the Scriptures, 
by alleging pretended obscurities, which rendered them, in their 
eyes, still doubtful and suspicious. 

For, my brethren, however evident may be the truth, that is 
to say, the law of God, whether in our heart, where it is writ- 
ten in shining and ineffaceable characters, or in the rules, which 
Jesus Christ hath left to us; we would always, either that cur 
conscience see nothing in it but what our passions see, or that 
these rules be not so explicit but what we may always be able 
to find out some favourable interpretation and mollification of 
them. 

In effect, two pretexts are commonly opposed by the sinners 
of the world against the evidence of truths the most terrible of 
the law of God. 

1st. In order to calm themselves on a thousand abuses, 
authorized by the world, they tell us that they believe them- 



414 EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. [Sehm. XXIV. 



selves to be in safety in that state; that their conscience re- 
proaches them with nothing on that head: and that, could they 
be persuaded that they were in the path of error, they would 
instantly quit it. First pretext which is opposed to the evi- 
dence of the law of God: candour and tranquillity of con- 
science. 

2dly, They oppose that the gospel is not so clear, and so ex- 
plicit on certain points as we maintain it to be; that each in- 
terprets it in his own way, and makes it to say, whatever he 
wishes; that what appears so positive to us, appears not so to 
all the world. Second pretext: the obscurity and uncertainty 
of the rules. 

Now, I say that the law of God hath a two-fold mark of 
evidence, which shall overthrow these two pretexts, and shall 
condemn, at the day of judgment, all the vain excuses of sin- 
ners. 

1st, It is evident in the conscience of the sinner; first reflec- 
tion. 2dly, It is evident in the simplicity of the rules: second 
reflection. — The evidence of the law of God in the conscience 
of men ! first character of the law of God which shall judge 
the false security and pretended candour of worldly souls. The 
evidence of the law of God, in the simplicity of its rules: second 
character of the law of God, which shall judge the affected un- 
certainties and the false interpretations of sinners. And thus 
it is, O my God! that thy holy law shall judge the world, and 
that the criminal conscience shall one day be confounded before 
thy tribunal, both by the lights of his own conscience and by 
the perspicuity of thy heavenly maxims. 

Part I. It is rather surprising that the greatest part of 
worldly souls, in justification of the abuses of the world and the 
danger of its maxims, alledge to us the candour and the tran- 
quillity of their conscience. Besides, that peace and security, 
in the false paths of iniquity, are rather their punishment than 
their excuse; and that, were it even true that the conscience 
should reproach them with nothing in manners regulated solely 
according to the false judgments of the world, that state would 
still be only so much the worse, and more hopeless of salvation : 
it appears that, of all tribunals, that of conscience is the last to 
which an unbelieving soul should appeal; and that nothing is 
less favourable to the errors of a sinner than the sinner himself. 

I know that there are hardened souls, to whom no ray of 
grace or of light can carry conviction; who live without re- 
morse and without anxiety in the horrors of an infamous licen- 
tiousness; in whom all conscience seems extinguished, and who 
carry the excess of their blindness, says St. Augustin, so far as 
even to glory in their blindness. But these are only dreadful 
examples of God's justice upon men; and if such have appear- 



Serm.XXIV.] EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. 415 



ed upon the earth, they only prove how far his neglect and the 
power of his wrath may sometimes go. 

Yes, my brethren, whether we affect boldly and openly to 
cast off the authority of the law, like the impious and the li- 
centious; whether we endeavour to mollify and artificially to - 
reconcile it with our passions, by favourable interpretations, 
like the greatest part of worldly souls and common sinners; our 
conscience renders a two-fold testimony within us to this divine 
law: a testimony of truth to the equity and to the necessity of 
its maxims, and a testimony of severity to the exactitude of its 
rules. 

I say, in the first place, A testimony of truth to the equity of 
its maxims. For, my brethren, God is too wise not to love order; 
and he is, at the same time, too good not to wish our welfare. 
His law must consequently bear these two characters; a charac- 
ter of equity, and a character of goodness : a character of equity, 
which regulates all the duties; a character of goodness, which 
makes us to find our peace and our happiness here below, in 
duty and in regularity. 

Thus we feel, in the bottom of our hearts, that these rules 
are just and reasonable; that the law of God commands no- 
thing but what is consistent with the real interests of man; 
that nothing is more consistent to the reasonable creature than 
gentleness, humanity, temperance, modesty, and all the virtues 
recommended in the gospel; that the passions prohibited by the 
law are the sole source of all our troubles; that the more we 
deviate from the precept, and from the law, the more do we re- 
move ourselves from peace and tranquillity of heart; and that 
the Lord, in forbidding us to yield ourselves up to impetuous 
and iniquitous passions, hath only forbidden us to yield ourselves 
up to our own tyrants, and that his only intention hath been to 
render us happy in rendering us believers. 

Behold a testimony which the law of God finds in the bottom 
of our hearts. Hurried away by the delusion of the senses, we 
vainly cast off the yoke of the holy rules; we can never succeed 
in justifying, even to ourselves, our own irregularities ; we al- 
ways internally adopt the interests of the law against ourselves; 
we always find within us a justification of the rules against the 
passions. We cannot corrupt this internal witness of the truth, 
which pleads within us for virtue; we always feel a secret mis- 
understanding between our inclinations and our lights : the law 
of God, born in our heart, incessantly struggles there against 
the law of the flesh foreign to man; it maintains its truths there 
in spite of ourselves, if it cannot maintain its authority; it offi- 
ciates as a censurer, if it cannot serve as a director : in a word, 
it renders us unhappy if it cannot render us believers 

Thus, in vain do we sometimes give way to all the bitterness 
of hatred and of revenge; we immediately feel that this cruel 



416 EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. [Serm. XXIV. 



pleasure is not made for the heart of man; that to hate, is, in 
fact, to punish ourselves; and, in returning to ourselves after 
the transports of passion, we find within us a principle of hu- 
manity which disavows their violence, and clearly points out to 
us, that gentleness and kindness were our first inclinations; 
and that, in commanding us to love our brethren, the law of 
God hath only done so, as to consult the right and most reason- 
able feelings of our heart, and to reconcile us with ourselves. 
Thou art more righteous than I, said Saul to David, in the 
time of his strongest hatred against him. That goodness, born 
in the heart of all men, forced from him that confession, and 
inwardly disavowed the injustice and the cruelty of his revenge. 

In vain do we plunge ourselves into brutal and sensual gra- 
tifications, and madly range after whatever may satisfy the in- 
satiable desires of pleasure: we quickly feel that debauchery 
leads us too far to be agreeable to nature: that whatever enslaves 
and tyrannizes over us, overturns the order of our first institution; 
and that the gospel, in prohibiting the voluptuous passions hath 
provided for the tranquillity of our heart, and for restoring to 
us all its elevation and nobility. How many hired servants of 
my father's, said the prodigal still bound in the chains of vice, 
have bread enough, and to spare ! and I consume my days in 
weariness and in shame. It was a remnant of reason and of no- 
bility which still spake in the bottom of his heart. 

Lastly, Investigate all the precepts of the law of God, and 
you will feel that they have a necessary connexion with the 
heart of man; that they are rules founded upon a profound 
knowledge of what takes place within us; that they solely con- 
tain the remedies of our most secret evils, and the succours of 
our most righteous inclinations; and that none but Him alone 
who knoweth the bottom of hearts, could be capable of laying 
down such maxims to men. The heathens themselves, in whom 
all truth was not yet extinguished, rendered this glory to the 
Christian morality; they were forced to admire the wisdom of 
its precepts, the necessity of its restraints, the sanctity of its 
counsels, the good sense and sublimity of all its rules; they 
were astonished to find, in the discourses of Jesus Christ, a 
more sublime philosophy than in the Roman or Grecian schools; 
and they could not comprehend how the son of Mary should be 
better acquainted with the duties, the desires, and all the se- 
cret folds of the human hearts, than Plato and all his disciples. 

Will you tell us, after this, that nature is our first law, and 
that tendencies to pleasures, inherent in our being, can never be 
crimes: I have often said it; it is an impiety only of conversa- 
tion; it is an ostentation of free-thinking, of which vanity makes 
a boast, but which truth inwardly belies. Augustin in his errors 
had spared no pains to efface, from the bottom of his heart, those 
remains of faith and of conscience which still recalled him to 
the truth; he had eagerly sought, in the most impious opinions 



Serm. XXIV.] EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. 417 



and in the most shocking errors, wherewithal to comfort him- 
self against his crimes; his mind, flying the light which pur- 
sued him, wandered from impiety to impiety, and from error to 
error; nevertheless, in spite of all his efforts and flights, the 
truth, always victorious in the bottom of his soul, proclaimed 
its triumph in spite of himself; he could succeed neither in se- 
ducing nor in quieting himself in his disorders: "I bore, O 
my God," says he, " a conscience racked, and still bleeding, as 
it were, from the grievous wounds which my passions incessant- 
ly made there; I was a burden to myself; I could no longer 
sustain my own heart; I turned myself on every side, and no 
where could it find ease; I knew not where to lay it, that I 
might be delivered from it, and that mine anxiety might be com- 
forted." 

Behold the testimony which a sinner, who, to all the keenness 
of the passions, added the impiety of opinions and the abuse of 
lights, renders of himself. And these examples are of every age; 
our own has beheld famous and avowed sinners who made an in- 
famous boast of not believing in God, and who were looked up- 
on as heroes in impiety and free-thinking; we have seen them 
touched at last with repentance like Augustin, and recalled from 
their errors; we have seen them, I say, make an open avowal, 
that they had never been able to succeed in effacing the rules and 
truth from their soul; that, amidst all their most shocking im- 
pieties and excesses, their heart, still Christian, inwardly belied 
their derisions and blasphemies; that, before men, they vaunted 
a strength of mind which forsook them in private; that that apa- 
rent unbelief concealed the most cruel remorses and the most 
gloomy fears; and that they had never been firm and tranquil 
in guilt. 

Yes, my brethren, guilt, always timorous, everywhere bears 
a witness of condemnation against itself. Everywhere you 
render homage, by your inward anxieties and remorses, to the 
sanctity of that law which you violate ; everywhere a fund of 
weariness and of sorrow, inseparable from guilt, makes you to feel 
that regularity and innocence are the only happiness which was 
intended for you on the earth; you vainly display an affected 
intrepidity; the guilty conscience always betrays itself. Cruel 
terrors march everywhere before you: solitude disquiets, dark- 
ness alarms you; you fancy to see phantoms coming from every 
quarter to reproach you with the secret errors of your soul : un- 
lucky dreams fill you with black and gloomy fancies; and guilt, 
after which you run with so much relish, pursues you afterwards 
like a cruel vulture, and fixes itself upon you, to tear your heart, 
and to punish you for the pleasure which it had formerly given 
you. — O my God ! what resources hast thou not left in our 
heart to recal us to thee ! And how powerful is the protection 
which the goodness and the righteousness of thy law finds in 
the bottom of our being? First testimony which the conscience 



418 EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. [Serm.XXIV. 



renders to the law of God, a testimony of truth to the sanct- 
ity of its maxims. 

But it also renders a testimony of severity to the exactitude 
of its rules. For a second illusion of the greatest part of worldly 
souls, who live exempted from great irregularities, but who 
otherwise live amidst all the pleasures, all the abuses, all the 
sensualities, and all the dissipations authorised by the world, is, 
that of wishing to persuade themselves that the gospel requires 
no more, and to persuade us, that their conscience reproaches 
them with nothing, and that they believe themselves safe in that 
state. Now, I say that here the worldly conscience is again not 
candid, and is deceived; and that, in spite of all those mollifica- 
tions which they endeavour to justify to themselves, it renders, 
in the bottom of our hearts, a testimony of severity to the law 
of God. 

In effect, order requires that all our passions be regulated by 
the bridle of the law; all our inclinations, corrupted in their 
source, have occasion for a rule to rectify and correct them; we 
confess this ourselves; we feel that our corruption pervades the 
smallest as well as the greatest things; that self-love infects all 
our proceedings; and that we everywhere find ourselves weak, 
and in continual opposition to order and duty; we feel, then, 
that the rule ought, in no instances, to be favourable to our in- 
clinations; that we ought everywhere to find it severe, because 
it ought everywhere to be in opposition to us; that the law can- 
not be in unity with us; that whatever favours our inclinations, 
can never be the remedy intended to cure them ; that whatever 
flatters our desires, can never be the bridle which is to restrain 
them; in a word, that whatever nourishes self-love, is not the law 
which is established for the sole purpose of destroying and an- 
nihilating it. Thus, by an inward feeling, inseparable from 
our being, we always discriminate ourselves from the law; our 
inclinations from its rules; our pleasures from its duties; and, 
in all dubious actions where we decide in favour of our inclina- 
tions, we perfectly feel that we are deviating from the law of God, 
always more rigid than ourselves. 

And allow me here, my brethren, to appeal to your conscience 
itself, which you always allege, and to which you continually re- 
fer us. Are you, honestly speaking, at your ease, as you wish 
to persuade us, in this life, altogether of pleasures, of dissipation, 
of indolence, and of sensuality: in a word, in this worldly life, 
of which you constantly maintain the innocence? Have you 
hitherto been able to succeed in persuading yourselves that it is 
the path which leads to salvation? Do you not feel that some- 
thing more is required of you by the gospel than you perform? 
Would you wish to appear before God with nothing to offer 
to him but these pleasures, these amusements which you call in- 
nocent, and of which the principal groundwork of your life is 
composed? I put the question to you, in those moments when, 



Serm. XXIV.] EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. 419 



more warmly affected perhaps by grace, you propose seriously 
to think upon eternity, do you not place, in the plan which you 
then form of a new life, the privation of almost all the very things 
in which you are continually telling us that you see no harm? 
Do you not begin by promising to yourselves, that, solely oc- 
cupied then with your salvation, you will renounce the excesses 
of gaming, the theatres, the vanities and indecencies of dress, 
the dissipation of public assemblies and pleasures; that you will 
devote more time to prayer, to retirement, to holy reading, and 
to the duties of religion? Now, what is it that you hereby ac- 
knowledge, unless it be, that, while you renounce not all these 
abuses; that you devote not more time to all these pious duties, 
you think not seriously upon your salvation; you ought to have 
no pretension to it; you are in the path of death and perdition? 

But, besides, you who carry so far the severity of your cen- 
sures against the godly, recollect all the rigour of your maxims, 
and of your derisions upon their conduct; do you not blame, do 
you not continually censure those persons who wish to connect, 
with a public profession of piety, those abuses, those amusements; 
of which you are the daily apologist, and who wish to enjoy 
the reputation of virtue without losing any of the pleasures of 
the world? Do you not mock their piety as a piece of mere 
grimace? Here it is that you emphatically display all the auster- 
ity of the Christian life. Do you not say that it is necessary 
either totally to renounce the world, or to continue to live as the 
world lives; and that all these ambiguous virtues serve only to 
decry the true virtue? I agree with you in this; but I reply to 
you, Your conscience dictates to you that it is not safe to give 
yourself partially to God, and your conscience reproaches you 
nothing, as ^you say, in a life in which God enters not at all? 
You condemn those mistaken souls whom, at least, an apparent 
division between the world and Jesus Christ may comfort? 
And you justify to us your conduct, you who have nothing in 
its justification but the abuses of the world and the danger of its 
habits? Do you then believe that the path of salvation is more 
rugged for those who profess piety than for you? That the 
world hath privileges thereon, which are forfeited from the mo- 
ment that we mean to serve God? Be consistent then with 
yourselves; and either condemn no more a worldly virtue, or 
no longer justify the world itself; since whatever you blame in 
that virtue is only that portion of it which the world supplies. 

And in order to make you more sensibly feel how far you 
are from being candid on this head, you continually take a pride 
in repeating that we despair of human weakness; that, in order 
to act up to all that we say in these Christian pulpits, it would 
be necessary to withdraw to the deserts, or to be angels rather 
than men: nevertheless, render glory to the force of truth. If 
a minister of the gospel were to deliver to you from' this place 
a doctrine quite opposite to that which we teach; were he to 



420 EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. [Serm. XXIV. 



announce to you the same maxims which you daily hold forth 
in the world; were he to preach to you in this place of the 
truth, that the gospel is not so severe as it is published; that 
we may love the world and yet serve God; that there is no 
harm in gaming, in pleasures, in theatres, except what we our- 
selves occasion; that we must live like the world while we live 
in the world; that all that language of the cross, of penitence, 
of mortification, and of self-denial, is more calculated for clois- 
ters than for the court, and for persons of a certain rank; and, 
lastly, that God is too good to consider as crimes a thousand 
things which are become habitual, and of which we wish you to 
make a matter of conscience; were he, I say, to preach these 
maxims to you in this holy place, what would you think of him? 
What would you say to his new doctrine? What idea would you 
have of this new apostle? Would you consider him as a man 
come down from heaven to announce to you this new gospel? 
Would you believe him to be better instructed than we in the 
holy truths of salvation, and in the rules of the Christian life? 
You would laugh at his ignorance or his folly; you would per- 
haps be struck with horror at the profanation which he would 
make of his ministry. 

And what, my brethren, these maxims announced before the 
altars would appear to you as blasphemy or madness; and, pro- 
mulgated in your daily conversations, would they become rules 
of reason and of wisdom? In the mouth of a minister of the 
gospel you would look upon them as the speeches of a madman ; 
and, in your mouth, should they appear more solid and more 
weighty? You would laugh, or rather you would be struck with 
horror at a preacher who should announce them to you; and 
you wish to persuade us that you speak seriously, and that you 
are consistent with yourselves, when, with so much confidence, 
you hold them forth to us. 

Ah ! my brethren how treacherous we are to God ! and how 
terrible will he be when he shall come to avenge, upon the lights 
of our own heart, the honour of his holy law! Our apparent ob- 
stinacy for the abuses of the world, of which we maintain the in- 
nocence, is a secret persuasion that the world and its abuses are 
a path of perdition; we publicly justify what we condemn in 
private; we are the hypocrites of the world and of its pleasures; 
and, through a most deplorable destiny, our life passes away in 
dissembling with ourselves, and in obstinately determining to 
perish in spite of ourselves. And surely, says the apostle John, 
if our heart, notwithstanding all our self-blindness, cannot help 
already condemning us in secret, have we more indulgence 
to expect from the terrible and Sovereign Judge of hearts than 
from our heart itself? 

Thus, my brethren, study the law of God in your own con- 
science, and you will see that it is not more favourable than we 
to your passions; consult the lights of your heart, and you will 



Serm. XXIV.] EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. 421 



feel that they perfectly accord with our maxims: listen to the 
voice of truth which speaks within you, and you will admit 
that we only repeat what it is continually whispering to your 
heart: You have no occasion, says St. Augustin, to apply to 
able men, in order to have the greatest part of your doubts 
cleared up; go no farther than yourselves for explanations and 
answers; apply to yourselves for what you have to do; listen 
to the decisions of your heart; follow the first impulse of your 
conscience, and you will always determine for that choice most 
comformable to the law of God; the first impression of the heart 
is always for the strictness of the law against the softenings of 
self-love: your conscience will always go farther, and will be 
more strict than yourselves; and, if you have occasion for our 
decisions, it will rather be in order to moderate the severity 
than to expose the false indulgence of it. 

Behold the first manner in which the law of God shall one 
day judge us: that law, manifested in the conscience of the sin- 
ner, and, as if born with him, shall rise up against him; our 
heart, marked with the seal of truth, shall be the witness to de- 
pose for our condemnation; our lights shall be opposed to our 
actions, our remorses to our manners, our speeches to our 
thoughts, our inward sentiments to our public proceedings, and 
ourselves to ourselves. Thus we bear, each of us, our condem- 
nation in our own heart. The Lord will not bring other proof 
than ourselves to determine the decision of our eternal repro- 
bation; and the soul before the tribunal of God, says Tertullian, 
shall appear at the same time both the criminal condemned and 
the witness which shall testify against his crimes. He will have 
nothing to reply, continues this father. You knew the truth, 
will be said to him, and you iniquitously withheld it; you ad- 
mitted of the happiness of the souls who seek only God, and 
you sought him not yourselves: you drew shocking pictures of 
the world, of its wearinesses, of its perfidies, and of its wicked- 
nesses, and you were always its slave and blinded worshipper; 
you inwardly respected the religion of your fathers, and you 
made a deplorable vaunt of impiety: you secretly dreaded the 
judgments of God, and you affected not to believe in him. In 
the bottom of your heart you rendered justice to the piety of 
the godly; you proposed to resemble them at some future period; 
and you tore and persecuted them with your derisions and cen- 
sures; in a word, your lights have ever been for God, and your 
actions for the world. 

O my God ! to what do men not carry their ingratitude and 
folly! Thou hast placed in us lights inseparable from our being, 
which, by disturbing the false peace of our passions and errors, 
continually recall us to order and to the truth ; and, through an 
imposition of vanity, we make a boast of being tranquil in our 
errors; we glory in a peace which thy mercy is still willing to 
disturb; and, far from publishing the riches of thy grace upon 



422 EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. [Serm. XXIV. 



our soul, which leaves us still open to the truth, we vaunt an 
obstinacy and a blindness which sooner or later shall be realized, 
and shall at last be the just punishment of an ingratitude and 
of a deceit so injurious to thy grace. First character of the evi- 
dence of the law of God: it is evident in the conscience of the 
sinner; but it is likewise so in the simplicity of its rules. 

Part II. Since man is the work of God, man can no longer 
live but conformably to the will of his author; and since God hath 
of man made his work, and his most perfect work, he could never 
leave him to live by chance upon the earth without manifesting 
to him his will; that is to say, without pointing out to him what 
he owed to his Creator, to his fellow-creatures, and to himself. 
Therefore, in creating him, he imprinted in his being a living 
light, incessantly visible to his heart, which regulated all his 
duties. But all flesh having perverted its way, and the abun- 
dance of iniquity which had prevailed over the earth, (unable, it 
is true, to efface that light entirely from the heart of men,) no 
longer permitting them to reflect or to consult it, and apparently 
no longer even maintaining itself to them, unless to render them 
more inexcusable; God, whose mercies seem to become more 
abundant in proportion as the wickedness of men increases, 
caused to be engraven, on tables of stone, that law which nature, 
that is to say, which himself had engraven on our hearts: he 
placed before our eyes the law which we bear within us, in order 
to recal us to ourselves. Nevertheless, the people, who were its 
first depositories, having again disfigured it by interpretations 
which adulterated its purity, Jesus Christ, the wisdom and the 
light of God, came at last upon the earth to restore to it its ori- 
ginal beauty; to purge it from the alterations of the synagogue; 
to dissipate the obscurities which a false learning and human 
traditions had spread through it; to lay open all its sublimity; 
to apply its rules to our wants; and, in leaving to us his gospel, 
no longer to leave an excuse, either to the ignorance or to the 
wickedness of those who violate its precepts. 

Nevertheless, the second pretext which is opposed in the 
world to the evidence of the law of God, is the pretended ambi- 
guity of its rules; they accuse us of making the gospel to say 
whatever we wish; they contest, they find answers, they spread 
obscurities through all, and they darken the law in such a man- 
ner that the world itself insists on having the gospel on its side. 

Now I say, that, besides the evidence of the conscience, the 
law of God is also evident in the simplicity of its rules, and con- 
sequently that the sinners, who wish thus to justify their ini- 
quitous ways, shall one day be overthrown, both by the testi- 
mony of their own heart and by the evidence of the holy rules. 

Yes, my brethren, the law of God, says the prophet, is pure, 
enlightening the eyes even of those who would wish to conceal 
it from themselves. In effect, Jesus Christ, in coming himself 



Serm. XXIV.] EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. 423 



to give to us a law of life and of truth for the regulation of our 
manners and our duties, and in which the evidence could not 
be too great, could never undoubtedly have meant to leave ob- 
scurities in it capable of deluding us, and of favouring passions 
which he expressly came to overthrow. Human laws may be 
liable to these inconveniences; the mind of man, which hath 
invented them, being unable to foresee all, it hath also been 
unable to obviate all the difficulties which might one day arise 
in the minds of other men, on the strength of its expressions, 
and even on the nature of its rules. But the spirit of God, 
author of the holy rules held out in the gospel, hath foreseen all 
the doubts which the human mind could oppose to his law; he 
hath read, in the hearts of all men to come, the obscurities 
which their corruption might shed over the nature of his rules: 
consequently, he hath concerted them in a manner so divine and 
so intelligible, so simple and so sublime, that the most ignorant, 
equally as the most learned, can never misconstrue his inten- 
tions, and be ignorant of the ways of eternal life. 

It is true, that sacred obscurities conceal in it the incompre- 
hensible mysteries of faith; but the rules of the manners are 
explicit and precise; the duties are there evident; and nothing 
can be more clear, or less equivocal, than the precepts of Jesus 
Christ. Not but that doubts and difficulties may spring up in 
the detail of the obligations; that the assemblage of a thousand 
different circumstances may not, in such a manner, darken the 
rule but that it may sometimes escape the most learned; and 
that, upon all the infinite duties of stations and conditions, 
all be so decided in the gospel that mistakes cannot often take 
place. 

But I say, (and I intreat of you to pursue these reflections 
which to me appear of the utmost consequence, and to com- 
prise all the rules of the manners,) in the first place, That if, 
upon the detail of duties, the letter of the law be sometimes 
dubious, the spirit of it is almost never so: that it is easily 
seen to which side the gospel inclines, and to what the analogy 
and ruling spirit of its maxims lead us: I say, that they mu- 
tually clear up each other; that they all go to the same end; 
that they are like so many rays, which, uniting in one centre, 
form so grand a lustre that it is impossible longer to mistake 
them; that there are principal rules which serve to elucidate 
every particular difficulty; and, lastly, that if the law appeal 4 
sometimes equivocal to us, the intention of the legislator, by 
which we ought to interpret it, never leaves room for either " 
doubt or mistake. 

Thus, you would wish to know, you who live at the court, 
where ambition is, as it were, the virtue of persons of your 
rank; you would wish to know if it be a crime ardently to long 
for the honours and the prosperities of the earth, to be never 
satisfied with your station, continually to wish advancement. 



424 EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. [Serm. XXIV. 



and to connect with that single desire, all your views, all your 
proceedings, all your cares, the whole foundation of your life. 
In answer to this, you are there told, that your heart ought to 
be where your treasure is; that is to say, in the desire and in 
the hope of eternal riches; and that the Christian is not of this 
world. Decide thereupon the difficulty yourselves. 

You demand, if continual gaming, amusements, theatres, 
and so many other pleasures, so innocent in the eyes of the 
world, ought to be banished from the Christian life. You are 
there told, that blessed are they who weep now; but woe unto 
those who laugh, and who receive their consolation in this 
world. Follow the spirit of this rule, and see to what it leads. 

You inquire, if, having to live in the world, you ought to 
live like the world; if we would wish to condemn almost all 
men who live like you; and if, in order to serve God, it be 
necessary to affect singularities which excite the ridicule of 
other men. You are there told, that we are not to conform to 
this corrupted age; that it is impossible to please men and to 
be the servant of Jesus Christ; and that the multitude is always 
the party of the reprobate. You have now to say whether the 
answer be explicit. 

You doubt, if, having pardoned your enemy, you be also 
obliged to see him, to serve him, to assist him with your wealth 
and credit; and if it be not more equitable to reserve your fa- 
vours and preferences for your friends. You are there told: 
Do good to those who have wished evil to you; speak well of 
those who calumniate you; love those who hate you. Enter into 
the spirit of this precept, and say if it doth not shed a light over 
your doubt, which instantly clears it up, and dissipates it. 

Lastly, propose as many doubts as you please upon duties, 
and it will be easy for you to decide them by the spirit of the 
law, if the letter say nothing of them; for the letter kills me, 
says the apostle : that is to say, to stop there, to look upon as 
duty only what is literally marked, to stop at the rude limits, 
and to enter no farther into the principle and into the spirit 
which vivifies it, is to be a Jew, and to be willing to be self- 
deceived. No longer tell us then, my brethren, when we con- 
demn so many abuses, which you, without scruple, allow your- 
selves, " But the gospel says nothing of them." Ah! the gos- 
pel says every thing to those who wish to understand it; the 
gospel leaves nothing undecided to whoever loves the law of 
God: the gospel is competent to all, to whoever searches it only 
for instruction; and it goes so much the farther, and says so 
much the more, as that, without stopping to regulate a parti- 
cular detail, it regulates the passions themselves; that, with- 
out detailing all the actions, it goes to repress those inclinations 
which are the sources of them; and that, without confining it- 
self to certain external circumstances of the manners, it pro- 
poses to us, as rules of duty, only self-denial, hatred of the 



Serm. XXIV.] EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. 425 



world, love of sufferance, contempt for whatever takes place, 
and the whole extent of its crucifying maxims: first reflec- 
tion. 

I say, in the second place, That it is not the obscurity of the 
law, but our passions, still dear, which give rise to all our 
doubts upon the duties; that the worldly souls are those who 
find most difficulty and most obscurity in the rules of the man- 
ners: that nothing appears clear to those who would wish that 
nothing were so; that every thing appears doubtful to those who 
have an interest in its being so: I say, with St. Augustin, that 
it is a willing spirit alone which gives understanding of the pre- 
cepts; that unless the rules and duties are loved, they can never 
be thoroughly known; that we enter into the truth only through 
charity; and that the sincere desire of salvation is the grand 
solver of all difficulties: I say, that faithful and fervent souls 
have almost never any thing to oppose to the law of God; and 
that their doubts are rather pious alarms upon holy actions, than 
pretexts and difficulties to authorise profane ones. 

Men have learned to doubt upon the rules of the manners, 
only since they have wished to connect them with their iniqui- 
tous passions. Alas! all was almost decided for the first be- 
lievers: in these happy ages, we see not that the first pastors of 
the church had many difficulties to resolve upon the detail of 
the duties: those immense volumes, which decide their doubts 
by endless resolutions, have appeared only with the corruption 
of manners: in proportion as believers have had more passions 
to satisfy, they have had more doubts to propose; it hath been 
necessary to multiply volumes upon volumes, in order to re- 
solve difficulties which cupidity alone formed; difficulties al- 
ready all resolved in the gospel, and upon which the first ages 
of faith would have been scandalized that they had dared to 
form even a doubt. Our ages, still more dissolute than those 
which preceded us, have still beheld these enormous collections 
of cases and resolutions increasing and multiplying to infinity; 
all the most incontestable rules of the morality of Jesus Christ 
are there become almost problems; there is no duty upon which 
corruption hath not had difficulties to propose, and to which a 
false learning hath not found mollifications: every thing has 
there been agitated, contested, and put in doubt: the mind of 
man hath there been seen quibbling with the spirit of God, and 
substituting human doctrines in place of that doctrine which 
Jesus Christ hath brought to us from heaven; and although we 
pretend not universally to blame all those pious and able men, 
who have left to us these laborious masses of decisions, it had 
been to be wished that the church had never called in such 
aids; and we cannot help looking upon them as remedies which 
are themselves become diseases, and as the sad fruits of the 
necessity of the times, of the depravity of manners, and of the 
decay of truth among men. 



426 EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. [Serm. XXIV. 



Doubts upon the duties arise, therefore, from the corruption 
of our hearts, much more than from the obscurities of the rules. 

The light of the law, says St. Augustin, resembles that of the 
sun; but vainly doth it shine, glitter, enlighten; the blind are 
unaffected by it: now, every siniaer is that blind person; the 
light is near to him, surrounds him, penetrates him, enters from 
every quarter into his soul;* but he is always himself far^from 
the light. Purify your heart, continues that holy father; re- 
move from it the fatal bandage of the passions; then shall you 
clearly see all your duties, and all your doubts shall vanish. 
Thus we continually see, that, when touched with grace, a soul 
begins to adopt solid measures for eternity, InV eyes are opened 
upon a thousand truths, which, till then, he had concealed from 
himself; in proportion as his passions diminish, his lights in- 
crease; he is astonished by what means be could so long have 
shut his eyes upon truths which now appear to him so evident 
and so incontestable; and far from a sacred guide having then 
occasion to contest, and to maintain against him the interests of 
the law of God, his prudence is required to conceal, as, I may 
say, from that contrite soul, the whole extent and all the terrors 
of the holy truths; to quiet him on the horror of past irregulari- 
ties, and to moderate the fears into which he is thrown by the 
novelty and the surprise of his lights. It is not then the rules 
which are cleared up, it is the soul which frees itself from, and 
quits its blindness; it is not the law of God which becomes more 
evident, it is the eyes of the heart which are opened to its lustre; 
in a word, it is not the gospel, but the sinner who is changed. 

And a fresh proof of what I advance is, that, upon those points 
of the law where no particular passion or interest blinds us, we 
are equitable and clear-sighted. A miser, who hides from him- 
self the rules of faith upon the insatiable love of riches, clearly 
sees the maxims winch condemn ambition or luxury. A vo- 
luptuary, who tries to justify to himself the weakness of his in- 
clinations, gives no quarter to the mean desires and to the 
sordid attachments of avarice. A man, mad for exaltation and 
fortune, and who considers the eternal exertions which he is 
under the necessity of making in order to succeed, as weighty and 
serious cares, and alone worthy his birth and his name, sees all 
the unworthiness of a life of amusement and pleasure, and clear- 
ly comprehends that a man, born with a name, degrades and dis- 
honours himself by laziness and indolence. A woman, seized 
with the rage of gaming, yet otherwise regular, is inveterate 
against the slightest faults which attack the conduct, and 
continually justifies the innocence of excessive gaming, by con- 
trasting it with irregularities of another description, from which 
she finds herself free. Another, on the contrary, intoxicated 
with her person and with her beauty, totally engrossed by her 
deplorable passions, considers that obstinate perseverance in an 
eternal gaming as a kind of disease and derangement of the 
mind, and, in the scheme of her own engagements, sees nothing 



Serm. XXIV.] EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. 427 



but an innocent weakness and involuntary inclinations, the^des- 
tiny of which we find in our hearts. 

Review all the passions, and you will see that, in proportion 
as we are exempted from some one, we see, we condemn it in 
others: we know the rules which forbid it: we go even to the 
rigour against others, upon the observance of duties which in- 
terest not our own weaknesses, and we carry our severity be- 
yond even the rule itself. The Pharisees, so instructed in, and 
so severe upon the guilt of the adultress, and upon the punish- 
ments attached by the law to the infamy of that infidelity, saw 
not their own pride, their hypocrisy, their implacable hatred, 
and their secret envy against Jesus Christ. Obscurities are 
only in our own heart; and we never begin to doubt upon our 
duties but when we begin to love those maxims which oppose 
them. Second reflection. 

In effect, I tell you, in the third place, you believe that the 
gospel is not so express as we pretend, upon the greater part of 
the rules which we wish to prescribe to you; that we carry its 
severity to excess, and that we make it to say whatever we 
please. Hear it then itself, my brethren ; we consent that, of 
all the duties prescribed to you by it, you shall think yourselves 
obliged to observe only those which are marked there in terms 
so precise and clear that it is impossible to mistake or miscon- 
strue them: more is not required of you, and we free you from 
all the rest. Hear it then: " And whosoever doth not bear his 
cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple. Whosoever 
he be of you, that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be 
my disciple. The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and 
the violent take it by force. Except ye repent, ye shall all like- 
wise perish. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Wo unto 
you that are full, for ye shall hunger: wo unto you that laugh 
now; for ye shall mourn and weep. Blessed are they that weep 
now; for ye shall laugh. He that loveth his father, his wife, 
his children, yea, and his life also, better than me, is not worthy 
of me. I say unto you, that ye shall weep and lament, but the 
world shall rejoice; and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow 
shall be turned into joy." 

Do I speak here, my brethren? Do I come to deceive you by 
an excess of severity, to add to the gospel, and to bring you 
only my own thoughts? Weak creature that I am, I have oc- 
casion myself, for indulgence; and if I took, in the weakness of 
my own heart^jthe doctrine which I announce to you, alas ! I 
would speak to you only the language of man: I would tell you 
that God is too good to punish inclinations which are born, it 
would appear, with us; that, to love God, it is not necessary to 
hate one's self: that, when rich, we ought to enjoy our wealth, 
and allow ourselves every gratification. Behold the language 
which I would hold; for man, delivered up to himself, can speak 
only this language of flesh and blood. But would you believe 



428 EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. [Serm. XXIV. 



me, as I have already demanded; would you respect my minis- 
try: would you look upon me as an angel from heaven, who 
should come to announce to you this new gospel. 

That of Jesus Christ speaks another language to you; I have 
related to you only his own divine words; these are the duties 
which he prescribes to you in clear and express terms. We con- 
sent that you confine your whole piety to these limits, and that 
you leave all the rest as doubtful, or, at least, commanded in 
terms less clear, and more susceptible of favourable interpreta- 
tions. Reckon not among your duties but these holy and in- 
contestable rules; we exact nothing more; limit yourselves to 
performing what they prescribe to you; and you will see that 
you shall do more than we even demand of you; and that the 
most common and most familiar maxims of the gospel go in- 
finitely farther than all our discourses. Third reflection. 

I also say to you, in the fourth place, that if almost all be 
contested in the world upon the most incontestable duties of 
Christian piety, it is because the gospel is a book unknown 
to the greatest part of believers; it is that, through a deplor- 
able abuse, a whole life is passed in acquiring vain learning, 
equally useless to man, to his happiness, and to his eternity: 
and the book of the law is never read, in which is con- 
tained the knowledge of salvation, the truth which is to de- 
liver us, the light which is to conduct us, the titles of our 
hopes, the testimony of our immortality? the consolations of our 
exilement, and the aids of our pilgrimage: it is that, on enter- 
ing into the world, care is taken to present to us those books 
in which are explained the rules of that profession to which we 
are allotted; and that the book of the law, in which the rules 
of the profession of the Christian are contained, that profession 
which shall survive all others, alone necessary, and the only one 
which shall accompany us into eternity; that book, I say. is 
left in neglect, and enters not into the plan of studies which 
ought to occupy our earlier years; lastly, it is that fabulous and 
lascivious histories childishly amuse our leisure; and that the 
history of God's wonders and mercies upon men, filled with 
events so grand, so weighty, so interesting, which ought to be 
the sole occupation, and the whole consolation of our life, does 
not appear to us worthy even of our curiosity. 

I am not surprised, after this, if we have continual occasion 
to maintain the gospel against the abuses and the prejudices of 
the world; if we are listened to with the same surprise, when 
we announce the commonest truths of the Christian morality 
as though we announced the belief and the mysteries of those 
savage and far distant nations, whose countries and manners 
are hardly known ! and if the doctrine of Jesus Christ find the 
same opposition at present in minds that it experienced at the 
birth of faith, it is, that there are Christians to whom the book 
of the gospel is almost equally unknown as it then was to the 



Serm. XXIV.] EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. 429 



heathens; who scarcely know whether Jesus Christ be come to 
bring laws to men, and who cannot, for a single moment, sup- 
port, without weariness, the reading of that divine book, the 
rules of which are so sublime, the promises so consoling, and of 
which the pagans themselves, who embraced faith, so much ad- 
mired the beauty and the divine philosophy. Thus, my breth- 
ren, read the holy books, and read them with that spirit of faith, 
of submission, of trust, which the church exacts, and you will 
soon be as well acquainted with your duties, and with the rules 
of the manners as the doctors themselves who teach you. 

And, indeed, my brethren, whence comes it, I beg of you, 
that the first believers carried so far the purity of manners and 
the holiness of Christianity? Were other maxims announced 
to them than those which we announce to you? Was another 
gospel preached to them, more clear and more explicit than that 
which we preach to you? Nevertheless, they were idolatrous 
and dissolute nations, who had brought, to the truths of faith, 
all the prejudices of the superstitions and of the most infamous 
voluptuousnesses authorised even by their worship. Did the 
gospel contain the smallest obscurities favourable to the passions? 
it surely ought to have been those first disciples of faith who 
should have made the mistake. Nevertheless, whence comes it 
they never proposed to the apostles and to their successors the 
same difficulties which you continually oppose to us, in support 
of the abuses of the world and of the interests of the passions? 
Whence comes it, that, with more inclinations and more preju- 
dices than we for pleasures, those blessed believers at once com- 
prehended how far, in order to obey the gospel, it was necessary 
to deny them to themselves? 

Ah ! it was that, night and day, they had the book of the law 
in their hands: it was that patience, and the consolation of the 
scriptures, were the sweetest occupation of their faith; it was 
that the letters of the holy apostles, and the relation of the life 
and of the maxims of Jesus Christ were the sole bond and the 
daily conversations of these infant churches; in a word, it is 
that, to whoever reads the gospel, whatever regards the duties 
is quickly decided. Fourth reflection. 

Lastly, I say, even admitting that some obscurities should be 
found there, doth not the law of God find all its evidence in in- 
struction and in the ministry? The Christian pulpits announce to 
you the purity of the holy maxims; the pastors publicly preach 
them; men, full of zeal and of knowledge, convey them down 
to posterity, in works worthy of the better times of the church: 
never had the piety of believers more aids; no age ever was 
more enlightened, or better knew the spirit of faith and the 
whole extent of duties. We no longer live in those ages of 
ignorance, in which the rules subsisted only in the abuses which 
had adulterated them: in which the ministry was often an occa- 
sion of error and of scandal for believers: and in which the 



430 EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. [Serm. XXIV. 



priest was considered as more enlightened, whenever he was 
more superstitious than his people. 

It would seem, O my God! that, in order to render us more 
inexcusable, in proportion as the wickedness of men increases 
on the one side, the knowledge of the truth which is to con- 
demn them, augments on the other; in proportion as the man- 
ners become corrupted, the rules become more evident; in pro- 
portion as faith becomes languid, it is cleared up and purified; 
like those fires, which, in expiriDg, give a momentary flash, and 
never display their lustre with such brilliancy as when on the 
eve of being extinguished. 

Not that there are not still among us many blind guides and 
prophets who announce their own dreams. But the snare is to 
be dreaded only by those who are willing to be deceived : when 
sincerely inclined to seek the Lord, we soon find the hand which 
knows to lead us to him: it is not then, properly speaking, the 
false guides who lead us astray, it is ourselves who seek them, 
because we wish to err with them; they are not the first authors 
of our ruin, they are only the encouragers of it; they do not 
lead us into the path of perdition, they only leave us there; and 
we are already determined to perish before we apply for their 
suffrage. In effect, we sensibly feel ourselves the danger and 
the imprudence of the choice we make; even the more we find 
the oracle complying, the more we mistrust his lights; the more 
he respects our passions, the less we respect his ministry; he is 
frequently made the subject even of our derisions; we turn 
into ridicule that very indulgence which we have sought; we 
vaunt the having found a protector so convenient for the human 
weaknesses: and, through a blindness which cannot be mention- 
ed without tears, the soul and eternal salvation are confided to 
a man who is believed unworthy, not only of respect, but even 
of attention and decency; like those Israelites who, a moment 
after having bowed the knee to the golden calf, and expected 
from it their salvation and their deliverance, broke it in pieces 
with disgrace, and reduced it to ashes. 

But after all, when the ignorance or the weakening of minis- 
ters should even be an occasion of error, the examples of the 
holy undeceive you. You see what, from the beginning, hath 
been the path of those who have obtained the promises, and 
whose memory and holy toils we still honour upon the earth: 
you see that none of them hath accomplished his salvation by 
that way which the world vaunts as being so safe and so inno- 
cent; you see that all the holy have repented, crucified the flesh, 
despised the world with its pleasures and maxims : you see that 
those ages so opposite to each other for their manners and cus- 
toms, have never made any change in the manners of the just; 
that the holy of the first times were the same as those of the 
last; . that the countries, even the most dissimilar for their dis- 
position and behaviour, have produced holy men, all resembling 
each other: that those of the most distant climates, and the 



Serm. XXIV.] EVIDENCE OF THE LAW OF GOD. 431 



most different from our own, resemble those of our own nation; 
that in every tongue and in every tribe, they have all been the 
same; lastly, that their situations have been different; that some 
have wrought out their salvation in obscurity, others in eleva- 
tion; some in poverty, others in abundance; some in the dissipa- 
tion of dignities and of public cares, others in silence and in the 
calm of solitude : in a word, some in the cottage, others on the 
throne; but that the cross, violence, and self-denial hath been 
the common path of all. 

What then art thou, to pretend to reach heaven by other 
ways? and thou flatterest thyself that, in that crowd of illus- 
trious servants of the living God, thou alone shalt be privileged. 
My God! with what lustre hast thou not surrounded the truth, 
in order to render man inexcusable ! His conscience shows it to 
him; thy holy law guards it for him; the voice of the church 
makes it to resound in his ears; the example of thy holy saints 
incessantly places it before his eyes; every thing rises up against 
guilt; all take the interests of thy holy law against his false 
peace; from every quarter proceed rays of light which go to 
bear the truth even to the bottom of his soul: no place, no 
situation can protect him from those divine sparks emitted 
from thy bosom, which everywhere pursue him, and which, in 
enlightening, rack him: the truth, which ought to deliver him, 
renders him unhappy; and, unwilling to love its light, he is 
forced, beforehand, to feel its just severity. 

What then, my dear hearer, prevents the truth from triumph- 
ing in your heart? Wherefore do you change, into an inex- 
haustible source of cruel remorses, lights which ought to be, 
within you, the whole consolation of your sorrows? Since, by 
a consequence of the riches of God's mercy upon your soul, you 
cannot succeed, like so many and impious hardened hearts, to 
stifle that internal monitor which incessantly recals you to order 
and duty, why will you obstinately withstand the happiness of 
your lot? Wny so many efforts to defend you from yourself, 
so many starts and flights to shun yourself? At last, recon- 
cile your hearts with your lights, your conscience with your 
manners, yourself with the law of God; behold the only secret 
of attaining to that peace of heart which you seek. Turn your- 
self on every side, you must always come to that. Observance 
of the law is the true happiness of man; it is deceiving himself 
to look upon it as a yoke; it alone places the heart at liberty. 
Whatever favours our passions, sharpens our ills, increases our 
troubles, multiplies our bonds, and aggravates our slavery; the 
law of God alone, in repressing them, places us in order, — quiets, 
cures, and delivers us. Such is the destiny of sinful man, to 
be incapable of happiness here below but by overcoming his 
passions ; to attain by violence alone to the true pleasures of the 
heart, and afterwards to that eternal peace prepared for those 
who shall have loved the law of the Lord. 



432 



IMMUTABILITY OF [Serm. XX V 



SERMON XXV. 

IMMUTABILITY OF THE LAW OF GOD. 

John, viii. 46. 

And if I say the truths why do ye not believe me? 

It is not enough to have defended the evidence of the law 
of God against the affected ignorance of the sinners who violate 
it; it is necessary likewise to establish its immutability against 
all the pretexts which seem to authorise the world to dispense 
itself from its holy rules. 

Jesus Christ is not satisfied with announcing to the Pharisees, 
that the truth which they knew shall one day judge them; that 
in vain they concealed it from themselves; and that the guilt of 
the truth, known and contemned, would be for ever upon their 
head. It is through the evidence of the law that he at first re- 
cals them to their own conscience; he afterwards accuses them 
of having struck even at its immutability; of substituting hu- 
man customs and traditions in place of the perpetuity of its 
rules; of accommodating them to times, to circumstances, and to 
interests; and declares to them that, even to the end of ages, a 
single iota shall not be changed in his law; that heaven and 
earth shall pass away, but that his law and his holy word shall 
for ever be the same. 

And behold, my brethren, the abuses which still reign among 
us against the law of God. We have shown to you that, in 
spite of the doubts and the obscurities which our lusts have 
spread over our duties, the light of the law, always superior to 
our passions, dissipated, in spite of ourselves, these obscurities, 
and that we were never hearty in the transgressions which we 
tried to justify to ourselves. But it is little to be willing, like 
the Pharisees, to darken the evidence of the law: like them, we 
likewise strike at its immutability; and, as if the law of God 
could change with the manners of the age, the differences of 
conditions, the necessity of situations, we believe that we can 
accommodate it to these three different circumstances, and in them 
find pretexts, either to mollify its severity or altogether to vio- 
late its precepts. 

1st, In effect the heart of man is changeable; every age sees 
new customs spring up among us; times and the customs always 
determine our manners: now, the law of God is immutable in 
its duration, always the same in all times and in all places; and, 



Serm. XXV.] THE LAW OF GOD. 



433 



by this first character of immutability, it alone ought to be the 
constant and perpetual rule of our manners. First reflection. 

2dly, The heart of man is vain: whatever levels us with the rest 
of men, wounds our pride; we love distinctions and preferences; 
we believe that, in the elevation of rank and of birth, we find 
privileges against the law: now, the law of God is immutable in 
its extent; it levels all stations and all conditions; it is the 
same for the great and for the people, for the prince and for the 
subject; and, by this second character of immutability, it ought 
to recal to the same duties that variety of stations and conditions 
which spreads so much inequality over the detail of manners 
and of the rules. Second reflection. 

Lastly, The heart of man connects every thing with itself; he 
persuades himself that his interests ought to be preferred to the 
law and to the interests of God himself; the slightest incon- 
veniences are reasons, in his eyes, against the rule: now, the 
law of God is immutable in all situations of life; and, by this 
last character of immutability, there is neither perplexity, nor 
inconveniency, nor apparent necessity, which can dispense us 
from its precepts. Last reflection. 

And behold the three pretexts, which the world opposes to 
the immutability of the law of God, overthrown: the pretext 
of manners and customs; the pretext of rank and of birth; the 
pretext of situations and inconveniences. The law of God is 
immutable in its durations; therefore, the manners and the cus- 
toms can never change it: the law of God is immutable in its 
extent; therefore, the difference of ranks and of conditions leaves 
it everywhere the same: the law of God is immutable in all 
situations; therefore, inconveniencies, perplexities, never justify 
the smallest transgression of it. 

Part I. One of the most urgent and most usual reproaches 
which the first supporters of religion formerly made to the hea- 
thens, was the instability of their moral system and the con- 
tinual fluctuations of their doctrine. As the fulness of truth 
was not in vain philosophy, and as they drew not their lights, 
said Tertullian, from that sovereign reason which enlightens 
all minds, and which is the immutable teacher of the truth, but 
from the corruption of their heart and the vanity of their 
thoughts, they qualified good and evil according to their caprices, 
and, among them, vice and virtue were almost arbitrary names. 
Nevertheless, continues this father, the most inseparable charac- 
1 ter of truth is that of being always the same: good and evil 
take their immutability from that of God himself, whom they 
glorify or insult; his wisdom, his holiness, his righteousness, 
are the only eternal rules of our manners : and it belongs not to 
men, at their pleasure, to change what men have not established, 
and what is more ancient than men themselves. 

Now, it was not surprising that morality had nothing dcter- 

E e 



434 



IMMUTABILITY OF [Serm. XXV, 



minate, in the heathen schools, delivered up to the pride and to 
the variations of the human mind: it was vanity, and not the 
truth, which made philosophers; the rules changed with the 
ages; new times brought new laws: in a word, the tenets did 
not change the manners; it was the change of manners which 
drew after it that of the tenets. 

But what is astonishing, is, that Christians, who have receiv- 
ed from heaven the eternal and immutable law which regulates 
their manners, believe it to be equally changeable as the mo- 
rality of philosophers; that they persuade themselves that the 
rigorous duties, which the gospel at first prescribed to the pri- 
mitive ages of the church, are mollified with the relaxation of 
manners, and are no longer made for the weakness and the cor- 
ruption of our ages. 

In effect, the gospel, the law of Jesus Christ is immutable in 
its duration : seeing every thing change around it, it alone changes 
not; the duties which it prescribes to us, founded upon the 
wants and upon the nature of man, are, like it, of all times and 
of all places. Every thing changes upon the earth, because 
every thing partakes of the mutability of its origin; empires 
and states have their rise and their fall; arts and sciences fall 
or spring up with the ages; customs continually change with 
the taste of the people, and with climates; from on high, in his 
immutability, God seems to sport with human affairs, by leav- 
ing them in an eternal revolution; the ages to come will destroy 
what we, with so much anxiety, rear up; we destroy what our 
fathers had thought worthy of an eternal duration ; and, in order 
to teach us in what estimation we ought to hold things here 
below, God permitteth that they have nothing determinate or 
solid but that very inconstancy which incessantly agitates 
them. 

But, amid all the changes of manners and ages, the law of 
God always remains the immutable rule of ages and of manners. 
Heaven and earth shall pass away; but the holy words of the 
law shall never pass away: such as the first believers received 
them at the birth of faith, such have we them at present; such 
shall our descendents one day receive them; lastly, such shall 
the blessed in heaven eternally love and adore them. The fer- 
vour or the licentiousness of ages adds or diminishes nothing to 
their indulgence, or from their severity; the zeal or the com- 
plaisance of men renders them neither more austere nor more 
accommodating. The intolerant rigour, or the excessive relax- 
ation of opinions and tenets leaves them all the wise sobriety 
of their rules; and they form that eternal gospel which the an- 
gel, in the Revelation, announces from on high in heaven, from 
the beginning, to every tongue and to every nation. 

Nevertheless, my brethren, when, in the manners of the pri- 
mitive believers, we sometimes represent to you all the duties 
of the gospel exactly fulfilled, their freedom from the world, 



Serm. XXV.] THE LAW OF GOD. 



435 



their absence from theatres and public pleasures, their assiduity 
in the temples, the modesty and the decency of their dress, their 
charity for their brethren, their indifference for all perishable 
things, their continual desire of going to be re-united to Jesus 
Christ; in a word, that simple, retired, and mortified life sustain- 
ed by fervent prayer, and by the consolation of the holy books, 
and such, in effect, as the gospel prescribes to all the disciples of 
faith; when we bring forward to you, I say, these ancient mo- 
dels, in order to make you feel, by the difference betwixt the 
primitive manners and yours, how distant you are from the 
kingdom of God; far from being alarmed at finding yourselves 
dissimilar to such a degree, that hardly could it be believed that 
you were disciples of the same Master and followers of the 
same law; you reproach us with continually recalling, even to 
weariness these primitive times, of never speaking but of the 
primitive church, as if it were possible to regulate our manners, 
upon manners of which every trace hath long been done away, 
impracticable at present among us, and which the times and cus- 
toms have universally abolished. You say, that men must be 
taken as they are; that it were to be wished that the primitive fer- 
vour had been kept up in the church; but that every thing be- 
comes relaxed and weakened through time, and that, to pretend 
to bring us back to the life of the primitive ages, is not holding 
out means of salvation, but is merely preaching up that nobody 
can now pretend to it. 

But I demand of you, in the first place, my brethren, if the 
times and the years, which have so much adulterated the purity 
of Christianity, have adulterated that of the gospel? Are the 
rules become more pliable and more favourable to the passions, 
because men are become more sensual and more voluptuous? 
And hath the relaxation of manners softened the maxims of 
Jesus Christ? When hehafch foretold in the gospel that, in the 
latter times, that is to say, in the ages in which we have the 
misfortune to live, faith should almost no longer be found upon 
the earth; that his name should hardly be known there, that 
his maxims should be destroyed, that the duties should be in- 
compatible with the customs; and that the just themselves should 
allow themselves to be almost infected by the universal conta- 
gion, and to be dragged away by the torrent of example; hath 
he then added, that, in order to accommodate himself to the 
corruption of these latter times, he would relax something of the 
severity of his gospel; that he would consent that customs, es- 
tablished by the ignorance and the licentiousness of the ages, 
should succeed to the rules and to the duties of his doctrine; 
that he would then exact of his disciples infinitely less than he 
exacted at the birth of faith; and that his kingdom, which, at 
first, was promised only to force, should then be granted to in- 
dolence and laziness? Hath he added this, I demand of you? 
On the contrary, he warns his disciples that then, in these latter 



436 



IMMUTABILITY OF [Serm. XXV. * 



times, it will more than ever be necessary to pray, to fast, to 
retire to the mountains, in order to shun the general corrup- 
tion; he warns them that wo unto those who shall then remain 
exposed amid the world; that those alone shall be safe who shall 
divest themselves of all, and who shall fly from amid the* cities: 
and he concludes by exhorting them once more to watch and to 
pray without ceasing, in order not to be included in the general 
condemnation. 

And, in effect, my brethren, the more disorders augment, the 
more ought piety to be fervent and watchful; the more we are 
surrounded with dangers, the more doth prayer, retreat, and 
mortification become necessary to us. The licentiousness of 
the present manners adds still new obligations to those of our 
fathers; and, far from the path of salvation having become more 
easy than in those former times, we shall perish with a moderate 
virtue, which, supported then by the common example, would 
perhaps have been sufficient to secure our salvation. 

Besides, my brethren, I demand of you, in the second place, 
Do you really believe that the rigorous precepts of the gospel, 
those maxims of the cross, of violence, of self-denial, of contempt 
for the world, have been made only for the primitive ages of 
faith? Do you believe that Jesus Christ hath destined all the 
rigours of his doctrine for those chaste, innocent, charitable, 
and fervent men, who lived in these happy times of the church; 
those men who denied themselves every pleasure, those pri- 
mitive heroes of religion, who, almost all, preserved, even to 
the end, the grace of regeneration which had made them Chris- 
tians? What! my brethren, Jesus Christ would have rewarded 
their zeal and their fidelity only by aggravating their yoke, and 
he would have reserved all his indulgence for the corrupted men 
of our ages? Jesus Christ would have made strict laws of re- 
serve, of modesty, of retirement, only for those primitive Chris- 
tian women who renounced all to please him; who divided them- 
selves only with the Lord and their husbands; who, shut up in 
the inclosures of their houses, brought up their children in faith 
and in piety? And he would exact less at present of those sen- 
sual, voluptuous, and worldly women, who continually wound 
our eyes by the indecency of their dress, and who corrupt the 
heart by the looseness of their manners, and by the snares which 
they lay for innocence? And where would here be that so much 
vaunted equity and wisdom of the Christian morality? More 
should then be exacted of him who owes less. The transgres- 
sions of the law should then dispense from its severity those 
who violate it. It would suffice to have passions, to be entitled 
to gratify them. The way of heaven would be rendered easy 
to sinners, while all its roughness would be kept for the just. 
And the more vices men should have, the less should they have 
occasion for virtues. 

Again allow me, my brethren, to add, in the last place, if the 



Serm. XXV. J THE LAW OF GOD. 



437 



change of manners could change the rules, if customs could jus- 
tify abuses, the eternal law of God should then accomodate 
itself to the inconstancy of the times, and to the ridiculous 
taste of men; a gospel would then be necessary for every age 
and for every nation; for our customs were not established in 
the times of our fathers, and undoubtedly they shall not pass to 
our last descendants; they are not common to all the nations, 
who, like us, worship Jesus Christ. Therefore, these customs 
cannot either become our rule or change it, for the rule is of all 
times and of all places; therefore, new manners do not form a 
new gospel, seeing we should anathematise even an angel who 
should come to announce to us a new one; and that the gospel 
would be no longer but a human and little-to-be-trusted law 
for men, if it could change with men; therefore, the rules and 
duties are not to be judged by manners and customs, but the 
manners and customs are to be judged by the duties and rules ; 
therefore, it is the law of God which ought to be the constant 
rule of the times, and not the variation of times to become even 
the rule of the law of God. 

No longer tell us, then, my brethren, that the times are no 
longer the same; but the law of God, is it not? That you can- 
not reform manners universally established: But you are not 
charged with the reformation of the universe: change yourself; 
save your own soul with which you are intrusted; behold all 
that is exacted of you; lastly, that the Christians of the primi- 
tive times had either more force or more grace than we; ah ! 
they had more faith, more constancy, more love for Jesus Christ, 
more contempt for the world: behold all that distinguished them 
from us. 

Have we not the same sources of grace as they, the same mi- 
nistry, the same altar, the same victim? Do the mercies of the 
Lord not flow with the same abundance upon his church? Have 
we not still among us pure and holy souls, who renew the fer- 
vour and faith of the primitive times, and who are living proofs 
of the possibility of the duties, and of the mercies of the Lord 
upon his people? " Tell us no longer, then," says the Spirit 
of God, " that the former days were better than these; for 
thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this." To follow Jesus 
Christ sufferance must always be required: in all ages, it hath 
been necessary to bear his cross, not to conform to the corrupted 
age, and to live as strangers upon the earth: in all times, the 
holy have had the same passions as we to resist, the same 
abuses to shun, the same snares to dread, the same obstacles 
to surmount: and, if there be any difference here, it is, that, 
in former times, it was not merely arbitrary customs which 
they had to shun, nor the derisions of the world which they had 
only to dread in declaring for Jesus Christ; it was the most 
cruel punishments to which they must expose themselves; it 
was the power of the Caesars, and the rage of tyrants, which 



438 



IMMUTABILITY OF [Serm. XXV. 



they must despise; it was superstitions, become respectable 
through their antiquity, countenanced by the laws of the em- 
pire, and by the consent of almost all the people, which they 
had to shake off : it was, in a word, the whole universe which 
they had to arm against themselves. But the faith of these 
pious men was stronger than punishments, than the tyrants, 
than the Caesars, than the whole world; and our faith cannot 
hold out against the absurdity of customs or the puerility of 
derision; and the gospel, which could formerly make martyrs, 
scarcely at present can it form a believer. The law of God is 
then immutable in its duration; always the same in all times 
and in all places; but it is likewise immutable in its extent, 
and the same for all stations and conditions. This is my second 
reflection. 

Part II. The most essential character of the law of Jesus 
Christ, is that of uniting, under the same rules, the Jew and 
the Gentile, the Greek and the Barbarian, the great and the 
people, the prince and the subject; in it there is no longer ex- 
ception of persons. The law of Moses, at least in its customs 
and in its ceremonies, was given only to a single people ; but 
Jesus Christ is a universal legislator; his law, as his death, is 
for all men. He came, of all people to make only one people; 
of all stations and of all conditions to form only one body: it is 
the same spirit which animates it, the same laws which govern 
it: different functions may there be exercised, different places, 
more or less honourable, be occupied; but it is the same spring 
which rules all the members of it. All these hateful distinc- 
tions, which formerly divided men, are destroyed by the church; 
that holy law knows neither poor nor rich; neither noble nor 
base born; neither master nor slave; it sees in men only the 
title of believer, which equals them all; it distinguishes them 
not by their names or by their offices, but by their virtues; and 
the greatest in its sight are those who are the most holy. 

Nevertheless, a second illusion, pretty common against the 
immutability of the law of God, is the persuasion that it changes 
and becomes mollified in favour of rank and of birth; that its 
obligations are less rigid for persons born to elevation; and 
that the obstacles, which high places and the manners attached 
to grandeur throw in the way of the observance of the strict 
duties of the gospel, and which render the practice of them al- 
most impossible to the great, likewise render their transgressions 
more innocent. They figure to themselves that the abuses per- 
mitted, in all times, by custom to the great, are likewise ac- 
corded to them by the law of God, and that there is another 
path of salvation for them than for the people. Thence, all the 
laws of the church violated; the times and the days consecrated 
to abstinence, confounded with the rest of days, are looked upon 
as privileges refused to the vulgar, and reserved solely for rank 



Serm. XXV.] THE LAW OF GOD. 



439 



and birth : thence, to live only for the senses, to be attentive 
only to satisfy them, to refuse nothing to taste, to vanity, to 
curiosity, to idleness, to ambition, to make a god of one's self; 
the same prosperity, which facilitates all these excesses, excuses 
and justifies them. 

But, my brethren, I have already said it, the gospel is the 
law of all men: great, people, you have all promised, upon the 
sacred fonts, to observe it. The church, in receiving you into 
the number of her children, hath not proposed to the great, other 
vows to make, and other rules to practise, than to the common 
people: you have all there made the same promises; all sworn, 
in the face of the altars, to observe the same gospel. The 
church hath not then demanded of you, if, by your birth ac- 
cording to the flesh, you were great, or of the common people; 
but if, by your regeneration in Jesus Christ, you meant to be 
faithful, and to engage yourself to follow his law: upon the 
vow which you have made of it, she hath placed the holy gospel 
upon your head, in order to mark that you submitted yourself 
to that sacred yoke. 

New, my brethren, all the duties of the gospel are reduced 
to two points. Some are proposed in order to resist and to 
weaken that fund of corruption which we bear from our birth; 
the others in order to perfect that first grace of the Christian 
which we have received in baptism; that is to say, the one in 
order to destroy in us the old Adam, the other in order to make 
Jesus Christ to grow there. Violence, self-denial, and morti- 
fication regard the first: prayer, retirement, vigilance, contempt 
for the world, desire of invisible riches, are comprised in the se- 
cond: behold the whole gospel. Now, I demand of you, what is 
there in these two descriptions of duties from which rank or 
birth can dispense you? 

Ought you to pray less than the other believers? Have you 
fewer favours to ask than they, fewer obstacles to overcome, 
fewer snares to avoid, fewer desires to resist? Alas! the more 
you are exalted, the more do dangers augment, the more do 
occasions of sin spring up under your feet, the more is the 
world beloved, the more doth every thing favour your passions, 
the more doth every thing militate against your good desires; 
it is in a situation so terrible for salvation that you find privi- 
leges which render it more mild and more commodious. The 
more, therfore, that you are exalted, the more doth mortifica- 
tion become necessary to you; for, the more that pleasures cor- 
rupt your heart, the more is vigilance necessary, because the 
dangers are more frequent; the more ought faith to be lively, 
because every thing around you, weakens and extinguishes it; 
the more ought prayer to be continual, because the grace, in 
order to support you, ought to be more powerful; humility of 
heart more heroical, because the attachment to things here be- 
low is more unavoidable: lastly, the more you are exalted, 



440 



IMMUTABILITY OF [Serm. XXV. 



the more doth salvation become difficult to you: this is the only 
privilege you can expect from elevation. Also, thou often 
war nest us, great God, that thy kingdom is only for the poor 
and the lowly: thou speakest not of the difficulty of salvation 
for the great and the powerful, but in terms which would seem 
to deprive them of all hope of pretending to it, if we knew not 
that thou wishest the salvation of all men, and that thy grace 
is still more powerful for our sanctification than prosperity for 
our corruption. 

And surely, my brethren, if grandeur and elevation were to 
render our condition more fortunate and more favourable with 
regard to salvation, in vain would the doctrine of Jesus Christ 
teach us to dread grandeurs and human prosperities; in vain 
would it be said to us: That blessed are they who weep, and 
who suffer here below; that woe unto those who laugh now, for 
they shall mourn and weep; and unto those who are rich, for 
they have received their consolation; and that, to receive our 
reward in this world, through the transitory riches and honours 
which we there receive, is almost a certain sign that we are not 
to receive it in the other. On the contrary, grandeur and pros- 
perity would become a state worthy of envy, even according to 
the rules of faith: against the maxim of Jesus Christ, it would 
be necessary to call those happy who are immersed in pleasures 
and in opulence: since, besides the comforts of a smiling for- 
tune, they would likewise find there a way of salvation more 
mild and more easy than in an obscure state; those who suffer, 
and who weep here below, would then be the most miserable of 
all men; since, to all the bitterness of their condition, would 
likewise be added those of a gospel, more rigorous and more 
austere for them than for the persons bom in abundance. What 
new gospel would it then be necessary to announce to you, if 
such were the rules of the morality of Jesus Christ? 

But I say not even enough. Granting that prosperity should 
not exact more rigid precautions in consequence of the dangers 
which surround it, it would exact, at least, more rigorous re- 
parations, through the crimes and excesses which are insepar- 
able from it. Alas! my brethren, is it not among you that 
the passions no longer know anv bounds; that the jealousies 
are more keen, the hatreds more lasting, revenge more honour- 
able, evil-speaking more cruel, ambition more boundless, and 
voluptuousness more shameful? Is it not among the great that 
the most shocking debauchery even refines upon the common 
crimes; that dissipations become an art; and that, in order to 
prevent those disgusts inseparable from licentiousness, resources 
are sought in guilt against guilt itself ? What indulgence then 
can you promise yourselves on the part of religion ? If the most 
righteous be responsible for the whole law, should the greatest 
sinners be discharged from it? Measure your duties upon your 
crimes, and not upon your rank; judge of yourselves by the 



Serm. XXV.] 



THE LAW OF GOD. 



441 



insults which you have offered to God, and not by the vain ho- 
mages Avhich are paid to you by men; number the days and the 
years of your crimes which shall be the eternal titles of your 
condemnation, and not the years and the ages of the antiquity 
of your race, which are only vain titles written upon the ashes 
of your tombs; examine what you owe to God, and not what 
men owe to you. If the world were to judge you, you might 
promise yourselves distinctions and preferences; but the world 
shall itself be judged; and he, who will judge it and you also, 
shall distinguish men only by their vices or by their virtues. 
He will not demand the names, he will demand only the deeds : 
calculate thereupon the distinctions which you ought to expect. 

Thus, we see not that Jesus Christ, in the gospel, propos- 
ed to the princes of the people, and to the grandees of Jerusa- 
lem, other maxims than to the citizens of Judea, and to his dis- 
ciples, all taken from the lowest rank of the people ; he speaks 
in the capital of Judea, and before all that Palestine held the 
most illustrious, as he speaks upon the borders of the sea, or 
upon the mountains, to that obscure populace which followed 
him; his maxims are not changed with the rank of those who 
listen to him. The cross, violence, contempt of the world, self- 
denial, abstinence from pleasures: behold what he announces 
at Jerusalem, the seat of kings, as at Nazareth, the most obscure 
place of Judea; to that young man who was ro rich, as to the 
children of Zebedee, whose only inheritance was their nets; to 
the sisters of Lazarus, of a distinguished rank in Palestine, as 
to the woman of Samaria, of a more obscure condition; his 
enemies themselves confessed that tins was his peculiar charac- 
ter, and were forced to render him this justice, that he taught 
the way of God in truth, and that he had no respect of rank or 
of persons. 

What do I say? Even after his death the gospel seemed a doc- 
trine sent down from heaven, only because that, announcing to the 
great and to the powerful sorrowful and crucifying maxims, ap- 
parently so incompatible with their station, they, nevertheless, 
submitted to the yoke of Jesus Christ, and embraced a law which, 
amid all their prosperity and abundance, permitted to them no 
more pleasures and comforts here below than to the common 
and simple people. And, in effect, why should the first defend- 
ers of faith have regarded the conversion of Caesars, and of the 
powerful of the age, as a proof of the truth and of the divinity 
of the gospel? What would there be so surprising, that the 
rich and the powerful had embraced a doctrine which would dis- 
tinguish them from the people by a greater indulgence; which, 
while it would prescribe tears, fasting, self-denial, to others, 
would relax in favour of the great, and would consent that pro- 
fusions, pleasures, sensualities, gaming, public places, all so 
rigorously forbidden to common believers, become an innocent 
occupation for them ; and that what is a road of perdition for 



442 



IMMUTABILITY OF 



[Serm. XXV. 



others, should for them alone be a road of salvation; it would 
then be the wisdom of the age which would have established the 
gospel, and not the folly of the cross; it would be the ar- 
tifices and the deferences of men, and not the arm of the Al- 
mighty; it would be flesh and blood, and not the power of God; 
and the conversion of the universe would have nothing more 
wonderful, than the establishment of superstitions and of sects. 

And candidly, my brethren, if the gospel had distinctions to 
make, and condescensions to grant; if the law of God could 
relax something of its severity, would it be in favour of those 
who are born to rank and to abundance? What! would it pre- 
serve all its rigours for the poor and the unfortunate? Would it 
condemn to tears, to fastings, to penitence, to poverty, those un- 
fortunate souls whose days are mingled with almost nothing but 
sufferance and sorrow, and whose only comfort is that of eat- 
ing with temperance the bread earned with the sweat of their 
brow? And would it discharge from their rigorous duties the 
grandees of the earth? And would it exact nothing painful of 
those whose days are only diversified by the variety of their 
pleasures? And would it reserve all its indulgence for those soft 
and voluptuous souls, who live only for the senses, who believe 
that they are upon the earth for the sole purpose of enjoying 
an iniquitous felicity, and who know no other god than them- 
selves? 

Great God ! It is the blindness which thy justice sheds over 
human prosperities; after having corrupted the heart, they like- 
wise extinguish all the lights of faith. It rarely happens but 
that the great, so enlightened upon the interests of the earth, 
upon the ways to fortune and to glory 5 upon the secret springs 
which give motion to courts and to empires, live in a profound 
ignorance of the ways of salvation. They have been so much 
accustomed to preferences by the world, that they are persuad- 
ed they ought likewise to find them in religion. Because men 
do them credit for the smallest steps taken in their favour, they 
believe, O my God! that thou regardest them with the same 
eyes as men; and that, in fulfilling some weak duties of piety, 
in taking some small steps for thee, they go even beyond what 
they owe to thee: as if their smallest religious works acquired 
a new merit from their rank; in place of which, they acquire it, 
in thy sight, only from that faith and from that charity which 
animates them. 

It is thus, that the law of God, immutable in its extent, is the 
same for all stations, for the great and for the people. But it 
is likewise immutable in all the situations of life; and it is nei- 
ther a difficult conjuncture, nor perplexity, nor apparent danger, 
nor pretext of public good, in which to violate, or even to soften 
it, becomes a legitimate and necessary modification. This was 
to have been my last reflection; but I abridge and go on. 

Yes, my brethren, every thing becomes reason and necessity 



Serm. XXV.] THE LAW OF GOD. 443 

against our duties, that is to say, against the law of God; situa- 
tions the least dangerous, conjunctures the least embarrassing, 
furnish us with pretexts to violate it with safety, and persuade 
us that the law of God would be unjust, and would exact too 
much of men, if, on these occasions, it were not to use indulgence 
with regard to us. 

Thus, the law of God commands us to render to each that 
which is his due; to retrench, in order to pay these debts in- 
curred through our excesses, and not to permit that our unfor- 
tunate creditors suffer by our senseless profusions : nevertheless, 
the general persuasion is, that, in a grand place, it is necessary 
to support the eclat of a public dignity; that the honour of the 
master requires that mean and sorry externals disgrace not the 
elevated post which he hath confided to us; that we are respon- 
sible to the sovereign, to the state, and to ourselves, before be- 
ing so to individuals; and that public property is then superior 
to the particular rule. 

Thus, the law of God enjoins us to tear out the eye which 
giveth offence, and to cast it from us; to separate ourselves 
from an object which, in all times, hath been the rock of our 
innocence, and near to which we can never be in safety: never- 
theless, the noise which a rupture would make, the suspicions 
which it might awaken in the public mind, the ties of society, 
of relationship, of friendship, which seem to render the separa- 
tion impossible without eclat, persuade us that it is not then 
commanded, and that a danger, become as if necessary, be- 
comes a security to us. 

Thus, the law of God commands us to render glory to the 
truth; not to betray our conscience by iniquitously withholding 
it; that is to say, not to dissemble it, through human interests, 
from those to whom our duty obliges us to announce it: never- 
theless, we persuade ourselves that truths, which would be un- 
availing, ought to be suppressed; and that a liberty, of which 
the only fruit would be that of risking our fortune, and of ren- 
dering ourselves hated, without rendering those better to whom 
we owe the truth, would rather be an indiscretion than a law of 
charity and of justice. 

Thus, the law of God prescribes to us to have in view, in 
public cares, only the utility of the people, for whom alone the 
authority is intrusted to us; to consider ourselves as charged 
with the interests of the multitude, as the avengers of injustice, 
the refuge against oppression and poverty: nevertheless, we 
* believe ourselves to be situated in conjunctures in which it is 
necessary to shut our eyes upon iniquity, to support abuses 
which we know to be untenable, to sacrifice conscience and 
duty to the necessity of the times, and, without scruple, to 
violate the clearest rules, because the inconveniencies, which 
would arise from their observance, seem to render their trans- 
gression necessary. Lastly, human pretexts, interests, and 



444 IMMUTABILITY OF [Serm. XXV. 

inconveniences, always make the balance to turn to their side; 
and duty, and the law of God, always yield to conjunctures 
and to the necessity of the times. 

Now, my brethren, I do not tell you, in the first place, that 
the interest of salvation is the greatest of all interests: that 
fortune, life, reputation, the whole world itself, put in compa- 
rison with your soul, ought to be reckoned as nothing; and 
that though heaven and the earth should change, that the whole 
world should perish, and every evil burst upon our head, these 
inconveniencies would always be infinitely less than the trans- 
gression of the law of God. 

Secondly, I do not tell you that the ✓ law hath always, at 
least, security in its favour against the pretext, because the ob- 
ligation of the law is clear and precise, in place of which, the 
pretext, which introduces the exception, is always doubtful; 
and that, consequently, to prefer the pretext to the law, is to 
leave a safe way, and to make choice of another, for which no 
person can be answerable to you. 

Lastly? I do not tell you that, the gospel having been only 
given to us in order to detach us from the world and from our- 
selves, and to make us die to all our terrestrial affections, it is 
deceiving ourselves to consider, as inconveniencies, certain con- 
sequences of that divine law, fatal either to our fortune, to our 
glory, or to our ease, and to persuade ourselves that it is then 
permitted to us to have recourse to expedients which mollify it, 
and conciliate its severity with the interests of our self-love. 
Jesus Christ hath never meant to prescribe to us easy and com- 
modious duties, and which take nothing from the passions; he 
came to bring the sword and separation to hearts, to divide man 
from his relations, from his friends, from himself; to hold out 
to us a way rugged and difficult to keep. Thus, what we call 
inconveniences and unheard-of extremities, are, at bottom, only 
the spirit of the law, the most natural consequences of the rules, 
and the end that Jesus Christ hath intended in prescribing them 
to us. 

That young man of the gospel regarded, as an inconveniency, 
the being unable to go to pay the last duties to his father, and 
to gather in what he had succeeded to, if he followed Jesus 
Christ; and it was precisely that sacrifice which Jesus Christ 
exacted of him. Those men invited to the feast looked upon as 
an inconveniency? the one to forsake his country-house, the 
other his trade, the last to delay his marriage; and it was in 
order to break asunder all these ties, which bound them still 
too much to the earth, that the father of the family invited 
them to come and seat themselves at the feast. Esther, at first, 
considered as an inconveniency to go to appear before Ahasue- 
rus, contrary to the law of the empire, and to declare herself a 
daughter of Abraham, and protectress of the children of Israel ; 
and, nevertheless, as the wise Mordecai represented to her, the 



Serm. XXV.] THE LAW OF GOD. 



445 



Lord had raised her to that point of glory and prosperity only 
for that important occasion. Whatever is a constraint to us, 
appears a reason against the law; and we take for inconvenien- 
cies the obligations themselves. 

Besides, my brethren, Is it not certain that the principal 
merit of oar duties is derived from the obstacles which never 
fail to oppose their practice; that the most essential character 
of the law of Jesus Christ is that of exciting against it all the 
reasons of flesh and blood; and virtue would resemble vice, if 
outwardly and inwardly it found in us only facilities and con- 
veniences? The righteous, my brethren, have never been peace- 
able observers of the holy rules: Abel found inconveniences in 
the jealousy of his own brother; Noah in the unbelief of his 
own citizens; Abraham in the disputes of his servants; Joseph 
in the dangers to which he was exposed through his love of mo- 
desty and the rage of a faithless woman; Daniel in the cus- 
toms of a profane court; the pious Esdras in the manners of 
his age; the noble Eleazar in the snares of a specious tempera- 
ment: lastly, follow the history of the just, and you will see 
that, in all ages, all those who have walked in the precepts and 
in the ordinances of the law, have experienced inconveniences 
in which righteousness itself seemed to authorise the transgres- 
sion of the rules; have encountered obstacles in their way, 
where the lights of human reason seemed to decide in favour 
of the pretext against the law; in a word, where virtue seemed 
to condemn virtue itself: and that, consequently, it is not new 
for the law of God to meet with obstacles; but that it is new to 
pretend to find in these obstacles legitimate excuses for dispens- 
ing ourselves from the law of God. 

And the decisive argument which confirms this truth is, that 
our passions alone form the inconveniencies which authorise us 
in seeking mollifications to our duties and to the law of God; 
and that views of fortune, of glory, of favour, engage us in 
certain proceedings, justify them in our eyes, in spite of the 
evidence of rules which condemn them, only because we love 
our glory and our fortune more than the rules themselves. 

Let us die to the world and to ourselves, my brethren; let us 
restore to our heart the sentiments of love and of preference, 
which it owes to its Lord: then every thing shall appear pos- 
sible; difficulties shall, in an instant, be done away; and what 
we call inconveniencies either shall no longer be reckoned as any 
thing, or we shall consider them as inseparable proofs of virtue, 
and not as the excuses of vice. How easy is it to find pretexts 
when we love them ! Arguments are never wanting to the pas- 
sions. Self-love is always ready in placing, at least, appear- 
ances on its side; it always changes our weaknesses into duties, 
and our inclinations soon become legitimate claims; and what 
in this is most deplorable, says St. Augustin, is that we call in 
even religion itself in aid of our passions; that we draw motives 



446 



FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. [Serm. XXVI. 



from piety, in order to violate piety itself; and that we have re- 
course to holy pretexts to authorise iniquitous desires. 

It is thus, O my God ! that almost our whole life is passed 
in seducing ourselves; that we employ the lights of our reason 
only in darkening those of faith; that we consume the few days 
we have to pass upon the earth only in seeking authorities for 
our passions, in imagining situations in which we believe our- 
selves to be enabled to disobey thee with impunity; that is to 
say, that all our cares, all our reflections, all the superiority of 
our views, of our lights, of our talents, all the wisdom of our 
measures and of our counsels, are limited to the accomplish- 
ment of our ruin, and to conceal from ourselves our eternal de- 
struction. 

Let us shun this evil, my brethren; let us reckon no way 
safe for us but that of the rules and of the law; and let us re- 
member that there shall be more sinners condemned through 
the pretexts which seem to authorise the transgressions of the 
law, than through the avowed crimes which violate it. It is 
thus that the law of God, after having been the rule of our 
manners upon the earth, shall be their eternal consolation in 
heaven. 



SERMON XXVI. 
FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. 

LUKE ii. 10, 11. 

For, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall 
be to all people; for unto you is born this day, in the city of 
David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. 

Behold, in effect, the grand tidings which, for four thou- 
sand years, the world hath expected; behold the grand event 
which so many prophets had foretold; so many ceremonies had 
figured; so many righteous had awaited, and which all nature 
seemed to promise, and to hasten by the universal corruption 
spread through all flesh; behold the grand blessing which God's 
goodness prepared for men, after the infidelity of their first pa- 
rent had rendered them all subject to sin and death. 

The Saviour, the Christ, the Lord, at last appears this day 
on the earth. 'The over-shadowed brings forth the righteous; 
the star of Jacob appears to the universe ; the sceptre is de- 
parted from Judah, and he, who was to come, is arrived; the 



Serm. XXVI.] FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. 447 



age of darkness is accomplished; the promised sign of the Lord 
to Judea hath appeared; a virgin has conceived and brought 
forth, and out of Bethlehem comes the leader who is to en- 
lighten and govern all Israel. 

What new blessings, my brethren, doth this birth not an- 
nounce to men? It would not, during so many ages, have been 
announced, awaited, desired ; it would not have formed the re- 
ligion of a whole people, the object of all the prophecies; the 
unravelling of all the figures, the sole end of all the proceedings 
of God towards men, had it not been the grandest mark of his 
love which he could give them. What a blessed night is that 
which presides at this divine bringing-forth ! It hath seen the 
light of the world shine forth in its darkness; the heavens re- 
sound with joy and songs of thanksgiving. 

But, my brethren, we must participate in the blessings which 
this birth is meant to bring us, in order to enter into all the 
transports of delight which it spreads through the heavens and 
the earth. The common joy is founded only on the common 
salvation which is offered to us; and if, in spite of this aid, we 
still obstinately persist in perishing, the church weeps over us, 
and we mingle mourning and sorrow with that joy with which 
such blessed tidings inspire it. 

Now what are the inestimable blessings which this birth brings 
to men? The heavenly spirits come themselves to make it known 
to the shepherds; it comes to render glory to God, and peace 
to men; and behold the whole foundation of this grand mystery 
laid open. To God, that glory of which men had wished to de- 
prive him; to men, that peace of which they had never ceased 
their struggles to deprive themselves. 

Part I. Man had been placed upon the earth for the sole pur- 
pose of rendering, to the author of his being, that glory and 
that homage which were his due. All called him to these du- 
ties; and every thing, which ought to have called, removed him 
from them. To his supreme Majesty he owed his adoration 
and his homage; to his paternal goodness, his love; to his in- 
finite wisdom, the sacrifice of his reason and of his lights. 
These duties, engraven on his heart, and born with him, were 
still also incessantly proclaimed to him by all creatures; he 
could neither listen to himself, nor to all things around him, 
without finding them; nevertheless, he forgets, he effaces them 
from his heart. He no longer saw, in the work, that honour 
and that worship which were due to the sovereign Architect; 
in the blessings with which he loaded him, that love which he 
owed to*his benefactor; in the obscurity spread through even 
natural causes, that impossibility, much less, of fathoming the 
secrecies of God, and that mistrust, in which he ought to live, 
of his own lights. Idolatry, therefore, rendered to the creature 
that worship which the Creator had reserved for himself alone: 



448 FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. [Serm. XXVI. 



the synagogue honoured him from the lips, and that love, which 
it owed to him, was confined to external homages totally un- 
worthy of him: philosophy lost itself in its own ideas, measured 
the lights of God by those of men, and vainly believed that 
reason, which knew not itself, was able to know all truth : three 
sores, spread over the face of the whole earth. In a word, God 
was no longer either known or glorified, and man was no longer 
known to himself. 

And, 1st, To what excesses had idolatry not carried its pro- 
fane worship? The death of a person loved, quickly exalted 
him to a divinity; and his vile ashes, on which his nothingness 
was stamped in characters so indelible, became themselves the 
title of his glory and of his immortality. Conjugal love made 
gods to itself; impure love followed the example, and deter- 
mined to have its altars: the wife and the mistress, the hus- 
band and the lover, had temples, priests, and sacrifices. The 
folly, or the general corruption, adopted a worship so ridicu- 
lous and so abominable; the whole universe was infected with 
it; the majesty of the laws of the empire authorised it; and 
the magnificence of the temples, the pomp of the sacrifices, the 
immense riches of the images, rendered that folly respectable. 
Every people was jealous in having their gods; in default of 
man they offered incense to the beast; impure homages became 
the worship of these impure divinities; the towns, the moun- 
tains, the fields, the deserts, were stained with them, and be- 
held superb edifices consecrated to pride, to lasciviousness, to 
revenge. The number of the divinities equalled that of the 
passions; the gods were almost as numerous as the men; alt 
became god with man; and the true God was the only one un- 
known to man. 

The world was plunged, almost from its creation, in the hor- 
ror of this darkness; every age had added to it fresh impieties. 
In proportion as the appointed time of the Deliverer drew near, 
the depravity of men seemed to increase. Rome itself, mistress 
of the universe, gave way to all the different worships of the 
nations she had subjugated; and beheld, exalted within her 
walls, the different idols of so many conquered countries, that 
they became the public monuments of her folly and blindness, 
rather than of her victories. 

But, after all, though all flesh had corrupted his way, God 
no longer wished to pour out his wrath upon men, nor to exter- 
minate them by a fresh deluge; he wished to save them. He 
had placed in the heavens the sign of his covenant with the 
world; and that sign was not the shining, though vulgar rainbow 
which appears in the clouds; it was Jesus Christ his only Son, 
the Word made flesh, the true seal of the eternal covenant, and 
the sole light which comes to enlighten the whole world. 

He appears on the earth, and restores to his Father that glory 
of which the impiety of a public worship had wished to deprive 



Serm. XXVL] FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. 



449 



him. The homage rendered to him, by his holy soul united to 
the world, at once makes amends to his supreme Majesty for all 
the honours which the universe had hitherto denied him, in or- 
der to prostitute them to a creature. A Man-God adorer ren- 
ders more glory to the divinity than all idolatrous ages and na- 
tions had deprived him of; and such homage must indeed have 
been agreeable to the sovereign God, seeing it alone effaced 
idolatry from the earth; made the blood of impure victims cease 
to flow; overturned the profane altars; silenced the oracles of 
demons; reduced to dust the vain idols, and changed their 
superb temples, till then the receptacle of every abomination, 
into houses of adoration and prayer. Thus was the universe 
changed: the only God, unknown even in Athens, and in those 
cities most celebrated for knowledge and polished manners, was 
worshipped: the world acknowledged its Author: God entered 
into his rights; a worship worthy of him was established over 
the whole earth; and he had everywhere adorers, who wor- 
shipped him in spirit and in truth. 

Behold the first blessing accruing from the birth of Jesus 
Christ, and the first glory which he renders to his Father. 
But, my brethren, is this grand blessing for us? We no longer 
worship vain idols, — an incestuous Jupiter, a lascivious Venus, 
a cruel and a revengeful Mars; but is God, therefore, more 
glorified among us? In their place do we not substitute fortune, 
voluptuousness, court favour, the world, with all its pleasures? 
For, whatever we love more than God, that we worship; what- 
ever we prefer to God, that becomes our god; whatever be- 
comes the sole object of our thoughts, of our desires, of our af- 
fections, of our fears and hopes, becomes likewise the object of 
our worship; and our gods are our passions, to which we sa- 
crifice the true God. 

Now, what idols of this kind still remain in the Christian 
world! You, that unfortunate creature, to whom you have 
prostituted your heart; to whom you sacrifice your wealth, 
your fortune, your glory, your peace; and from whom neither 
religious motives, nor even those of the world, can detach you, 
that is your idol; and what less is she than your divinity, since, 
in your madness, you do not refuse her even the name? You 
that court that fortune which engrosses you, to which you de- 
vote all your cares, all your exertions, all your movements, in 
short, your whole soul, mind, will, and life, that is your idol; 
and what criminal homage do you refuse from the moment that 
it is exacted of you, and that it may become the price of its fa- 
vour? You, that shameful intemperance, which debases your 
name and birth; which no longer accords even with our man- 
ners; which has drowned and besotted all your talents in the 
excesses of wine and debauchery; which, by rendering you cal- 
lous to every thing else, leaves you neither relish nor feeling 
but for the brutal pleasures of the table, that is your idol: you. 

F f 



450 



FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. [Seum. XXVI. 



think that you live only in those moments given to it; and your 
heart renders more homage to that infamous and abject god 
than your despicable and profane songs. The passions formerly 
made the gods; and Jesus Christ hath destroyed these idols 
only by destroying the passions which had raised them up: you 
exalt them again, by reviving all the passions which had ren- 
dendered the whole world idolatrous. And what matters it to 
know a single god, if you elsewhere bestow your homages? 
Worship is in the heart; and if the true God be not the God 
of your heart, you place, like the pagans, vile creatures in his 
place, and you render not to him that glory which is his due. 

Thus, Jesus Christ doth not confine himself to manifesting 
the name of his Father to men, and to establish, on the ruins 
of idols, the knowledge of the true God. He raised up wor- 
shippers, who reckon external homages as nothing, unless ani- 
mated and sanctified by love; and who shall consider mercy, 
justice, and holiness, as the offerings most worthy of God, and 
the most shining attendants of their worship. Second blessing 
from the birth of Jesus Christ, and second sort of glory which 
he renders to his Father. 

In effect, God was known, says the prophet, in Judea; Je- 
rusalem beheld no idols in the public places, usurping the ho- 
mages due to the God of Abraham; " there was neither ini- 
quity in Jacob, nor perverseness in Israel:" that single por- 
tion of the earth was free from the general contagion. But the 
magnificence of its temple, the pomp of its sacrifices, the splen- 
dour of its solemnities, the exactitude of its lawful observances, 
constituted the whole merit of its worship; all religion was con- 
fined to these external duties. Its morals were not less crimi- 
nal : Injustice, fraud, falsehood, adultery, every vice subsisted, 
and was even countenanced by these vain appearances of wor- 
ship: God was honoured from the lips; but the heart of that 
ungrateful people was ever distant from him. 

Jesus Christ comes to open the eyes of Judea on an error so 
gross, so ancient, and so injurious to his Father. He comes to 
inform them, that man may be satisfied with externals alone, 
but that God regards only the heart; that every outward ho- 
mage which withholds it from him, is an insult and a hypo- 
crisy rather than a true worship; that it matters little to pu- 
rify the external, if the internal be full of infection and putre- 
faction; and that God is truly worshipped only by loving him. 

But, alas ! my brethren, is this mistake, so wretched and so 
often reproached to the synagogue by Jesus Christ, not still the 
error of the majority of us? To what, in fact, is the whole of 
our worship reduced? To some external ceremonies; to fulfil- 
ling certain public duties prescribed by the law; and even this 
is the religion of the most respectable. They come to assist in 
the holy mysteries; they do not, without scruple, depart from 
the laws of the church; they repeat some prayers which custom 



Serm.XXVL] FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. 



451 



has consecrated; they go through the solemnities, and increase 
the crowd which runs to our temples: behold the whole. But 
are they, in consequence, more detached from the world and 
from its criminal pleasures? less occupied with the cares of a 
vain dress, or of fortune? more inclined to break off a crimi- 
nal engagement, or to fly opportunities which have so often 
been a rock to their innocence? Do they bring to these exter- 
nal practices of religion, a pure heart, a lively faith, a guileless 
charity? All their passions submit amid all these religious works, 
which are given to custom rather than to religion. 

And remark, I pray you, my brethren, that they would not 
dare to dispense themselves altogether from them; to live like 
the impious without any profession of worship, and without 
fulfilling at least some of its public duties: They would consi- 
der themselves as anathematised, and worthy of the thunder of 
heaven. And yet they dare to sully these holy duties by the 
most criminal manners ! And yet they do not view themselves 
with horror, while rendering useless these superficial remains 
of religion, by a life which religion condemns and abhors ! And 
they dread not the wrath of God, in continuing crimes which 
attract it on our heads, and in limiting all that is his due to vain 
homages which insult him ! 

Nevertheless, as I have already said, of all the worldly these 
are the most prudent, and, in the eyes of the world, the most 
regular. They have not yet thrown off the yoke, like so many 
others; they do not arrogate to themselves a shocking glory in 
not belie ving in God; they blaspheme not what they do not 
know; they do not consider religion as a mockery and a human 
invention; they still wish to hold to it by some externals; but 
they hold not to it by the heart; but they dishonour it by their 
irregularities; but they are not Christians but in name. Thus, 
even in a greater degree than formerly under the synagogue, 
the magnificent externals of religion subsist among us, along 
with a more profound and more general depravity of manners 
than ever the prophets reproached to the obstinacy and hypo- 
crisy of the Jews: thus, that religion, in which we glory is 
no longer, to the greatest number of believers, but a superficial 
worship: thus, that new covenant, which ought to be written 
only in the heart; that law of spirit and life, which ought to 
render men wholly spiritual; that inward worship, which ought 
to have given to God worshippers in spirit and in truth, — has 
given him only phantoms, only fictitious adorers; the mere ap- 
pearances of worship; in a word, but a people still Jewish, 
which honours him from the lips, but whose corrupted heart, 
stained with a thousand crimes, chained by a thousand iniqui- 
tous passions, is always far distant from him. 

Behold the second blessing of the birth of Jesus Christ, in 
which we have no part. He comes to abolish a worship wholly 
external, which was confined to sacrifices of animals and law- 



452 



FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. [Si km. XXVI- 



full ceremonies, and which, in not rendering to God the ho- 
mage of our love, alone capable of glorifying him, rendered not 
to him that glory which is his due: in place of these appear- 
ances of religion, he comes to substitute a law which ought to 
be fulfilled wholly in the heart; a worship, of which the love 
of his Father ought to be the first and principal homage. Ne- 
vertheless, this holy worship, this new precept, this sacred 
trust, which he hath confided to us, has miserably degenerated 
in our hands; we have turned it into a worship wholly Phari- 
saical, in which the heart has no part; which has no influence 
in changing our irregular propensities; which has no effect upon 
our manners, and which only renders us so much the more cri- 
minal, as we abuse the blessing which ought to wash out and 
purify all our crimes. 

Lastly, Men had likewise wished to ravish from God the glory 
of his providence and of his eternal wisdom. Philosophers, 
struck with the absurdity of a worship which multiplied gods to 
infinity, and forced, by the sole lights of reason, to acknowledge 
one sole Supreme Being, disfigured the nature of that Being by 
a thousand absurd opinions. Some figured to themselves an in- 
dolent god; retired within himself; in full possession of his own 
happiness; disdaining to abase himself by paying attention to 
what passes on the earth; reckoning as nothing men whom he 
had created; equally insensible to their virtues as to their vices; 
and leaving wholly to chauce the course of ages and seasons, the 
revolutions of empires, the lot of each individual, the whole 
machine of this vast universe, and the whole dispensation of 
human things. Others subjected him to a fatal chain of events ; 
they made him a god without liberty and without power; and, 
while they regarded him as the master of men, they believed 
him to be the slave of destiny. The errors of reason were then 
the only rule of religion, and of the belief of those who were 
considered as even the wisest and most enlightened. 

Jesus Christ comes to restore to his Father that glory of which 
the vain reasonings of philosophy had deprived them. He comes 
to teach to men that faith is the source of true lights; and that 
the sacrifice of reason is the first step of Christian Philosophy. 
He comes to fix uncertainty, by instructing us in what we ought 
to know of the Supreme Being, and what, with regard to him, 
we ought not to know. 

It was not, in effect, sufficient that men, in order to render 
glory to God, should make a sacrifice to him of their life, as to 
the author of their being, and should, by that avowal, acknow- 
ledge the impiety of idolatry; that they should make a sacrifice 
to him of their love and of their heart, as to their sovereign 
felicity, and thereby proclaim the insufficiency and the inutility 
of the external and pharisaical worship of the synagogue; it was 
likewise required, that to him they should sacrifice their reason, 
as to their wisdom and to their eternal truth, and thus be un- 



Serm. XXVI.] FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. 



453 



deceived with regard to the vain researches and the conceited 
knowledge of philosophers. 

Now, the sole hirth of a Man-God, the ineffable union of our 
nature with a divine person, disconcerts all human reason; and 
this incomprehensible mystery held out to men as their whole 
knowledge, their whole truth, their whole philosophy, their 
whole religion, at once makes them feel that the truth, which 
they hitherto had in vain sought, must be sought, not by vain 
efforts, but by the sacrifice of reason and of our feeble lights. 

But, alas ! where among us are believers who make a 
thorough sacrifice of their reason to faith; and who, rejecting 
their own lights, humble their eyes, in a respectful and silent 
adoration, before the majestic impenetrability of religion? I 
speak not of those impious, still to be found among us, who 
deny a God. Ah ! we must leave them to the horror and the 
indignation of the whole universe which knows a divinity, and 
which worships him; or rather leave them to the horror of their 
own conscience, which inwardly invokes and calls upon him in 
spite of themselves, while outwardly they are glorifying them- 
selves in professing not to know him. 

I speak of the majority of believers, who have an idea of the 
divinity, almost equally false and equally human, as had former- 
ly the pagan philosophers; who consider him as nothing in all 
the accidents of life; who live as if chance or the caprice of 
men determined all things here below; and who acknowledge 
good-luck and bad-luck as the two sole divinities which govern 
the world, and which preside over every thing relative to the 
earth. I speak of those men of little faith, who, far from ado- 
ring the secrecies of futurity in the profound and impenetrable 
councils of Providence, go to search for them in ridiculous and 
childish prophecies; attribute to man a knowledge which God 
hath solely reserved to himself; with a senseless belief await, 
from the dreams of a false prophet, events and revolutions which 
are to decide the destiny of nations and empires: found there- 
upon vain hopes for themselves, and renew either the folly of 
pagan augurs and soothsayers, or the impiety of the pythoness of 
Saul, and of the oracles of Delphi and Dodona. I speak of 
those who wish to penetrate into the eternal ways of God on 
our lots; and who, being unable, by the sole powers of reason, 
to solve the insurmountable difficulties of the mysteries of grace 
with regard to the salvation of men, far from crying out with 
the apostle, " O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and 
knowledge of God!" are tempted to believe, either that God 
doth not interfere in our salvation; or, if he do, that it is needless 
for us to interfere in it ourselves. I speak of those dissolute 
characters in the world, who always find plausible and convin- 
cing, though, in fact, weak and foolish in the extreme, whatever 
unbelief opposes to faith; who are staggered by the first frivo- 
lous doubt proposed by the impious; who appear as if they 



454 



FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. [Sem*. XXVI 



would be delighted that religion were false; and who are less 
touched with that respectable load of proofs which overpowers a 
conceited reason and its truth, than with a senseless discourse 
which opposes it, in which there is generally nothing important 
but the boldness of the impiety and of the blasphemy. Lastly, 
I speak of many believers who turn over to the people the be- 
lief of so many wonderful actions which the history of religion 
has preserved to us: who seem to believe that whatever is 
above the power of man is likewise beyond tbe power of God; 
and who refuse credit to the miracles of a religion which is 
solely founded on them, and which is itself the greatest of all 
miracles. 

Behold how we still snatched from God that glory which the 
birth of Jesus Christ has rendered to him. It had taught us to 
sacrifice our own lights to the incomprehensible mystery of his 
manifestation in our flesh, and no longer to live but by faith; it 
had fixed the uncertainties of the human mind, and recalled it 
from the errors and the abyss in which reason had plunged it, 
to the way of truth and life, and we abandon it : and even un- 
der the empire of faith we wish still to walk as formerly, un- 
der the standards, if I may venture to speak in this manner, of 
a weak reason : the mysteries of religion, which we cannot com- 
prehend, shock us; we suspect, we reform all; we would have 
God to think like man. Without altogether losing our faith, 
we suffer it to be inwardly weakened; we allow it to remain in- 
active: and it is this relaxation of faith which has corrupted our 
manners, multiplied vices, inflamed all hearts with a love of 
things present; extinguished the love of riches to come; placed 
trouble, hatred, and dissension amoog believers, and effaced 
those original marks of innocence, of sanctity, and of charity, 
which at first had rendered Christianity so respectable even to 
those who refused submission to it. But not only doth the birth 
of Jesus Christ restore to God that glory of which men had 
wished to deprive him; it likewise restores to men that peace, 
of which they had never ceased to deprive themselves: "And 
on earth peace, good will towards men." 

Part II. A universal peace reigned throughout the uni- 
verse when Jesus Christ, the " Prince of Peace." appeared on 
the earth: all the nations subject to the Roman empire peace- 
ably supported the yoke of those haughty masters of the world: 
Rome herself, after civil dissensions, which had almost depopu- 
lated her walls, filled the islands and deserts with her pros- 
cribed, and bathed Europe and Asia with the blood of her citi- 
zens, breathed from the horror of these troubles, and re-united 
under the authority of a Caesar, experienced, in slavery, a 
peace which she had never, during the enjoyment of her liberty, 
been able to accomplish. 

The universe was then at rest: but that was but a deceitful 



Serm. XXVI.] FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. 455 



calm. Man, the prey of his own violent and iniquitous pas- 
sions, experienced within himself the most cruel dissension and 
war: far from God, delivered up to the agitations and frenzies 
of his own heart: combated by the multiplicity and the eter- 
nal contrariety of his irregular propensities, he was unable to 
find peace, because he never sought it but in the source of all 
his troubles and disquiets. Philosophers made a boast of being 
able to bestow it on their followers; but that universal calm of 
the passions which they gave hopes of to their sage, and which 
they so emphatically announced, might suppress their sallies, 
but it left the whole venom in the heart. It was a piece of 
pride and ostentation; it masked the outward man; but, under 
that mask of ceremony, man always knew himself to be the 
same. 

Jesus Christ comes to-day upon the earth, to bring that true 
peace to men which the world had never hitherto been able to 
give them. He comes radically to cure the evil; his divine 
philosophy is not confined to the promulgation of pompous pre- 
cepts, which might be agreeable to reason, but which cured not 
the wounds of the heart; and, as pride, voluptuousness, hatred, 
and revenge, had been the fatal sources of all the agitations 
experienced by the heart of man, he comes to restore peace to 
him, by draining them off, through his grace, his doctrine, and 
his example. 

Yes, my brethren, I say that pride had been the original 
source of all the troubles which tore the heart of man. What 
wars, what frenzies, had that fatal passion not lighted upon the 
earth ? With what torrents of blood bad it not inundated the 
universe? And what is the history of nations and of empires, of 
princes and of conquerors, of every age and people, but the his- 
tory of those calamities with which pride from the beginning 
had afflicted men ! The entire world was but a gloomy theatre, 
upon which that haughty and senseless passion every day ex- 
hibited the most bloody scenes. But the external operations 
were but a faint image of the troubles which the proud man in- 
wardly experienced. Ambition was a virtue: moderation was 
looked upon as- meanness : an individual overthrew his country, 
overturned the laws and customs, rendered millions miserable, 
in order to usurp the first place among his fellow-citizens; and 
the success of his guilt insured him every homage; and his 
name, stained with the blood of his brethren, acquired only addi- 
tional lustre in the public annals which preserved its memory: 
and a prosperous villain became the grandest character of his 
age. That passion, descending among the crowd, became less 
striking; but it was neither less animated nor furious: the 
obscure was not more at his ease than the public man: each 
wished to carry off the prize from his equals: the orator, the 
philosopher, wrangled for, and tore from each other that glory, 
which, in fact, was the sole end of all their toils and watchings; 



456 



FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. [Serm. XXVI. 



and, as the desires of pride are insatiable, man, to whom it was 
then honourable totally to yield himself up to it, being unable 
to rest in any degree of elevation, was likewise incapable of 
peace and tranquillity. Pride, become the sole source of human 
honour and glory, was likewise become the fatal rock of the 
quiet and happiness of men. 

The birth of Jesus Christ, by correcting the world of this 
error, re-establishes on the earth that peace which pride had 
banished from it. He might have manifested himself to men, 
with all the marks of splendour which the prophets attributed 
to him: He might have assumed the pompous titles of con- 
queror of Judah, of legislator of the people, of deliverer of Israel : 
Jerusalem, in these glorious marks, would have recognised him 
whom she awaited: but Jerusalem, in these titles, saw only a 
human glory; and Jesus Christ comes to undeceive, and to 
teach her, that such glory is nothing; that such an expectation 
had been unworthy of the oracles of so many prophets who had 
announced him; that the Holy Spirit, which inspired them, 
could hold out only holiness and eternal riches to men; that all 
other riches, far from rendering them happy, only increased 
their evils and crimes; and that his visible ministry was to cor- 
respond with the splendid promises, which had, for so many 
ages, announced him, only by being wholly spiritual, and that 
he should intend only the salvation of men. 

Thus, he is born at Bethlehem, in a poor and abject state; 
without external state or splendour, he whose birth the songs 
of all the armies of heaven then celebrated; without title which 
might distinguish him in the eyes of men, he who was exalted 
above all principality or power; he suffers his name to be 
written down among those of the obscurest subjects of Caesar; 
he whose name was above all other names, and who alone had 
the right of writing down the names of his chosen in the book 
of eternity: vulgar and simple shepherds alone came to pay him 
homage; he, before whom whatever is mighty on the earth, in 
heaven, and in hell, ought to bend the knee: lastly, whatever 
can confound human pride is assembled at the spectacle of his 
birth. If titles, rank, or prosperity, had been able to render us 
happy here below, and to shed peace through our heart, Jesus 
Christ would have made his appearance clothed in them, and 
would have brought all these riches to his disciples; but he 
brings peace to us only by holding them in contempt, and by 
teaching us to hold them equally in contempt: he comes to 
render us happy, only by coming to suppress desires which 
hitherto had occasioned all our disquiets: he comes to point out 
to us more solid and more durable riches, alone capable of 
calming our hearts, of filling our desires, of easing our troubles: 
riches of which man cannot deprive us, and which require only 
to be loved and to be wished for, to be assured of possessing 
them. 



Serm. XXVI.] FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. 



457 



Nevertheless, Who tastes of this blessed peace ? Wars, trou- 
bles, frenzies, are they more rare since his birth? Are those 
empires and states which worship him, in consequence more 
peaceful? Does that pride which he came to destroy occasion 
less commotion and confusion among men? Alas! Seek among 
Christians that peace which ought to be their inheritance, and 
where shall you find it? — In cities? Pride sets every thing 
there in motion; every one wishes to soar above the rank of 
his ancestors: an individual, exalted by fortune, destroys the 
happiness of thousands who walk in his steps, without being able 
to attain the same point of prosperity. In the circle of domestic 
walls? They conceal only distresses and cares: and the father 
of the family, solely occupied with the advancement rather than 
the Christian education of his offspring, leaves to them, for inher- 
itance, his agitations and disquiets, which they, in their turn, shall 
one day transmit to their descendants. In the palaces of kings? 
But there it is that a lawless and boundless ambition gnaws 
and devours every heart; it is there that, under the specious 
mask of joy and tranquillity, the most violent and the bitterest 
passions are nourished; it is there that happiness apparently 
resides, and yet where pride occasions the greatest number of 
discontented and miserable. In the sanctuary? Alas! there 
ought surely to be found an asylum of peace; but ambition per- 
vades even the holy place; the efforts there are more to raise 
themselves above their brethren, than to render themselves use- 
ful to them; the holy dignities of the church become, like those 
of the age, the reward of intrigue and caballing; the religious 
circumspection of the prince cannot put a stop to solicitations 
and private intrigues; we there see the same inveteracy in ri- 
valships, the same sorrow in consequence of neglect, the same 
jealousy towards those who are preferred to us; a ministry is 
boldly canvassed for, which ought to be accepted only with fear 
and trembling: they seat themselves in the temple of God, 
though placed there by other hands than his: they head the 
flock without his consent to whom it belongs, and without his 
having said as to Peter, " Feed my sheep;" and, as they have 
taken the charge without call and without ability, the flock are 
led without edification and without fruit, alas ! and often with 
shame. — O peace of Jesus Christ ! which surpasses t all sense, 
sole remedy against the troubles which pride incessantly excites 
in our hearts, who shall then be able to give thee to man? 

But, secondly, If the disquiets of pride hath banished peace 
from the earth, the impure desires of the flesh had not given 
rise to fewer troubles. Man, forgetting the excellency of his 
nature, and the sanctity of his origin, gave himself up, like the 
beasts, without scruple, to the impetuosity of that brutal in- 
stinct. Finding it the most violent and the most universal of 
his propensities, he believed it to be also the most innocent and 
the most lawful. In order still more to authorise it, he made it 



458 



FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. [Serm. XXVI. 



part of his worship, and formed to himself impure gods, in whose 
temples that infamous vice bcame the only homage which did 
honour to their altars: even a philosopher, in other respects the 
wisest of pagans, dreading that marriage should put a kind of 
check on that deplorable passion, had wished to abolish that 
sacred bond; to permit among men, as among animals, a brutal 
confusion, and only multiply the human race through crimes. 
The more that vice became general, the more it lost the name 
of vice; and, nevertheless, what a deluge of miseries had it not 
poured out upon the earth? With what fury had it not been 
seen to arm people against people; kings against kings; blood 
against blood: brethren against brethren; everywhere carry- 
ing trouble and carnage, and shaking the whole universe? 
Ruins of cities, wrecks of the most flourishing empires, sceptres 
and crowns overthrown, became the public and gloomy monu- 
ments which eveiy age reared up, in order, it would seem, to 
preserve, to following ages, the remembrance and the fatal tra- 
dition of those calamities with which that vice had afflicted the 
human race. It became itself an inexhaustible source of troubles 
and anxieties to the man who then gave himself up to a bound- 
less gratification of it; it held out peace and pleasure; but 
jealousy, excess, frenzy, disgust, inconstancy, and black chagrin, 
continually walked in its steps; till then, that the laws, the 
religion, and the common example authorising it, the sole love 
of ease, even in these ages of darkness and corruption, kept free 
from it a small number of sages. 

But that motive was too feeble to check its impetuous course, 
and to extinguish its fires in the heart of men; a more powerful 
remedy was required, and that is the birth of the Deliverer, who 
comes to draw men out of that abyss of corruption, in order to 
render them pure and without stain; to break asunder those 
shameful bonds, and to give peace to their hearts, by restoring 
to them that freedom and innocence of which the slavery and 
tyranny of that vice had deprived them. He is born of a virgin- 
mother, and the purest of all created beings: he thereby gives 
estimation and honour to a virtue unknown to the world, and 
which even his people considered as a reproach. Besides, in 
uniting himself with us, he becomes our head; incorporates 
us with himself; makes us to become members of his mystical 
body; of that body which no longer receives life and influence 
but from him: of that body whose every ministry is holy; 
which is to be seated at the right hand of the living God, and 
to glorify him for ever. 

Behold, my brethren, to what height of honour Jesus Christ, 
in this mystery, exalts our flesh ; he makes of it the temple of 
God; the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit; the portion of a body 
in which the fullness of the divinity resides; the object of the 
kindness and the love of his Father. But do we not still pro- 
fane this holy temple? Do we not still turn to shame the mem- 



Serm. XXVI.] FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. 



459 



bers of Jesus Christ? Do we, in a higher degree, respect our 
flesh, since it is become a holy portion of his mystical body? 
Does that shameful passion not still exercise the same tyranny 
over Christians, that is to say, over the children of sanctity and 
liberty? Does it not still disturb the peace of the universe, the 
tranquillity of empires, the harmony of families, the order of 
society, the confidence of marriage, the innocence of social in- 
tercourse, the lot of every individual? Are not the most tragical 
spectacles still every day furnished to the world by it? Does it 
respect the most sacred ties and the most respectable character? 
Does it not reckon as nothing every duty? Does it pay atten- 
tion even to decency? And does it not turn all society into a 
frightful confusion, where custom has effaced every rule? Even 
you, who listen to me, from whence have arisen all the miseries 
and unhappinesses of your life, is it not from that deplorable 
passion? Is it not that which has overturned your fortune; 
which has cast trouble and dissension through the heart of your 
family; which has swallowed up the patrimony of your fathers; 
which has dishonoured your name; which has ruined your 
health, and now makes you to drag on a gloomy and disgraceful 
life on the earth ? Is it not, at least, that which actually rends 
your heart, at present filled with it? What goes on within you 
but a tumultuous revolution of fears, desires, jealousies, mis- 
trusts, disgusts, and frenzies? And since that passion has stain- 
ed your soul, have you enjoyed a single moment of peace ! Let 
Jesus Christ again be born within your heart; he alone can be 
your true peace: chase from it the impure spirits, and the man- 
sion of your soul will be at rest; become once more a child of 
grace; innocence is the only source of tranquillity. 

Lastly, the birth of Jesus Christ reconciles men to his Fa- 
ther; it re-unites the Gentile and the Jew; it destroys all those 
hateful distinctions of Greek and Barbarian, of Roman and 
Scythian; it extinguishes all animosities and hatreds; of all 
nations it makes only one people; of all his disciples, only one 
heart and one soul: last kind of peace which it brings to men. 
Formerly they were united together, neither by worship, a 
common hope, nor by the new covenant, which, in an enemy, 
holds out to us a friend. They considered each other almost as 
creatures of a different species: the diversity of religions, of 
manners, of countries, of languages, of interests, had, it would 
appear, as if diversified in them the same nature: scarcely did 
they recognise each other by that figure of humanity, which was 
the only sign of connexion still remaining to them. Like wild 
beasts, they mutually exterminated each other; they centered 
their glory in depopulating the lands of their fellow-creatures, 
and in carrying in triumph their bloody heads as the splendid 
memorials of their victories: it might have been said that they 
held their existence from different irreconcilable creators, al- 
ways watchful to destroy each other, and who had placed them 



460 



FOR CHRISTMAS DAY. [Serm. XXVI. 



here below only to revenge their quarrel, and to terminate their 
disagreement by the general extinction of one of the two par- 
ties; every thing disunited man, and nothing bound them toge- 
ther but interest and the passions, which were themselves the 
sole source of their divisions and animosities. 

But Jesus Christ is become our peace, our reconciliation, the 
corner-stone which binds and unites the whole fabric, the living 
head which unites all his members, and makes but one body of 
the whole. Every thing knits us to him; and whatever knits 
us to him unites us to each other. It is the same Spirit which 
animates us, the same hope which sustains us, the same bosom 
which brings us forth, the same fold which assembles us, and 
the same Shepherd who conducts us; we are children of the 
same Father, inheritors of the same promises, citizens of the 
same eternal city, and members of one same body. 

Now, my brethren, have so many sacred ties been successful 
in binding us together? Christianity? which ought to be but the 
union of hearts, the tie to knit believers to each other, and Je- 
sus Christ to believers; and which ought to represent upon the 
earth an image of the peace of heaven; Christianity itself is no 
longer but a horrible theatre of troubles and dissentions: war 
and fury seem to have established an eternal abode among Chris- 
tians; religion itself, which ought to unite, divides them. The 
unbeliever, the enemy of Jesus Christ, the children of the false 
prophet, who came to spread war and devastation through men, 
are in peace; and the children of peace, and disciples of him 
who, this day? comes to bring it to men, have their hands con- 
tinually armed with fire and sword against each other ! Kings 
rise up against kings; nations against nations; the seas which 
separate re-unite them for their mutual destruction : a vile mor- 
sel of stone arms their fury and revenge; and whole nations go 
to perish and to bury themselves under its walls, in contesting 
to whom shall belong its ruins: the earth is not sufficiently vast 
to contain them, and to fix them, each one in the bounds which 
nature herself seems to have pointed out for states and empires; 
each wishes to usurp from his neighbour; and a miserable field 
of battle, which is scarcely sufficient to serve as a burial place 
to those who have disputed it, becomes the prize of those rivers 
of blood with which it is for ever stained. — O divine Reconcili- 
ator of men! return then once more upon the earth, since the 
peace which thou broughtest to it at thy birth still leaves so 
many wars and so many calamities in the universe ! 

Nor is this all; that circle itself, which unites us under the 
same laws, unites not hearts and affections; hatreds and jea- 
lousies divide citizens equally as they divide nations; animosi- 
ties are perpetuated in families, and fathers transmit them to 
their children, as an accursed inheritance. In vain may the 
authority of the prince disarm the hand, it disarms not the 
heart; in vain may the sword be wrested from them, with the 



Sekm. XXVIL] FOR THE DAY, &c. 



461 



sword of the tongue they continue a thousand times more cru- 
elly to pierce their enemy; hatred, under the necessity of con- 
fining itself within, becomes deeper and more rancorous, and 
to forgive is looked upon as a dishonourable weakness. Oh! 
my brethren, in vain then hath Jesus Christ descended upon the 
earth! He is come to bring peace to us; he hath left it to us as 
his inheritance: nothing hath he so strongly recommended to 
us as that of loving each other ; yet fellowship and peace seem 
as if banished from among us, and hatred and animosity divide 
court, city, and families; and those whom the offices, the in- 
terests of the state, decency itself, and blood ought, at least, to 
unite, — tear, defame, would wish to destroy, and to exalt them- 
selves on the ruins of each other: and religion, which shows us 
our brethren even in our enemies, is no longer listened to; and 
that awful threatening, which gives us room to expect the same 
severity on the part of God which we shall have shown to our 
brethren, no longer touches or affects us; and all these motives, 
so capable of softening the heart, still leave it filled with all the 
bitterness of hatred. We tranquilly live in this frightful state : 
the justice of our complaints with regard to our enemies calms 
us on the injustice of our hatred and of our rooted aversion to- 
wards them; and if, on the approach of death, we apparently 
hold out to them the hand of reconciliation, it is not that we 
love them more, it is because the expiring heart hath no longer 
the force to sustain its hatred, that almost all our feelings are 
extinguished, or, at least, that we are no longer capable of feel- 
ing any thing but our own weakness and our approaching disso- 
lution. Let us then unite ourselves to the newly-born Jesus 
Christ; let us enter into the spirit of that mystery; with him 
let us render to God that glory which is his due : it is the only 
mean of restoring to ourselves that peace, of which our passions 
have hitherto deprived us. 



SERMON XXVIL 
FOR THE DAY OF THE EPIPHANY. 

Matthew ii. 2. 

For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship 

him. 

Truth, that light of Heaven, figured by the star which on 
this day appears to the magi, is the only thing here below wor- 
thy of the cares and the researches of man. It alone is the light 



462 



FOR THE DAY [Seem. XXVII. 



of our mind, the rule of our heart, the source of solid joys, the 
foundation of our hopes, the consolation of our fears, the alle- 
viation of our evils, the cure for all our afflictions: it alone is 
the refuge of the good conscience and the terror of the bad; the 
inward punishment of vice, the internal recompense of virtue: 
it alone immortalizes those who have loved it, and renders il- 
lustrious the chains of those who suffer for it, attracts public 
honours to the ashes of its martyrs and defenders, and bestows 
respectability on the abjection and the poverty of those who 
have quitted all to follow it : lastly, it alone inspires magnani- 
mous thoughts, forms heroical men, souls of whom the world is 
unworthy, sages alone worthy of that name. All our atten- 
tions ought therefore to be confined to know it; all our talents 
to manifest it; all our zeal to defend it: in men we ought then 
to look only for truth, to have no wish of pleasing them but by 
truth, to esteem in them only truth, and to be resolved that 
they never shall please us but by it. In a word, it would ap- 
pear that it should have only to show itself, as on this day to 
the magi, to be loved; and that it shows us to ourselves in or- 
der to teach us to know ourselves. 

Nevertheless, it is astonishing what different impressions the 
same truth makes upon men. To some it is a light which di- 
rects their steps, and, in pointing out their duty, renders it 
amiable to them: to others it is a troublesome light, and, as it 
were, a kind of dazzling, which vexes and fatigues them: last- 
ly, to many it is a thick mist which irritates, inflames them 
with rage, and completes their blindness. It is the same star 
which, on this day, appears in the firmament: the magi see it; 
the priests of Jerusalem know that it is foretold in the prophets; 
Herod can no longer doubt that it hath appeared, seeing wise 
men come from the extremities of the east, to seek guided by 
its light, the new King of the Jews. Nevertheless, how dissi- 
milar are the dispositions with which they receive the same 
truth manifested to them. 

In the magi it finds a docile and sincere heart : in the priests, 
a heart mean, deceitful, cowardly, and dissembling: in Herod 
a corrupted and hardened heart. Consequently, it forms wor- 
shippers in the magi, dissemblers in the priests, and in Herod 
a persecutor. Now, my brethren, such is still at present among 
us the lot of truth : it is a celestial light which is shown to us, 
says St Augustin; but few receive it, many hide and dim it, 
and a still greater number contemn and persecute it : it shows 
itself to all, but how many indocile souls who reject it? How 
many mean and cowardly souls who dissemble it? How many 
black and hardened hearts who oppress and persecute it? Let 
us collect these three marked characters in our gospel, which 
are to instruct us in all our duties relative to truth: truth re- 
ceived, truth dissembled, truth persecuted. Holy Spirit, Spirit 
of Truth, destroy in us the spirit of the world, that spirit of 



Serm. XXVIL] 



OF THE EPIPHANY. 



463 



error, of dissimulation, of hatred against the truth; and in this 
holy place, destined to form ministers, who are to announce it 
even in the extremities of the earth, render us worthy of loving 
the truth, of manifesting it to those who know it not, and of 
suffering all for its sake. 

Part I. I call truth that eternal rule, that internal light in- 
cessantly present within us, which, in every action, points out 
to us what we ought, and what we ought not to do; which 
enlightens our doubts, judges our judgment; which inwardly 
condemns or approves us, according as our behaviour is agree- 
able or contrary to its light; and which, in certain moments more 
splendid and bright, more evidently points out to us the way in 
which we ought to walk, and is figured to us by that miraculous 
light which, on this day, conducts the magi to Jesus Christ. 

Now, I say that the first use which we ought to make of truth 
being for ourselves, the church, on this day, proposes to us, in 
the conduct of the magi, a model of those dispositions which 
alone can render the knowledge of truth beneficial and salutary 
to us. There are few souls, however they may be plunged in 
the senses and in the passions, whose eyes are not at times 
opened upon the vanity of the interests they pursue, upon the 
grandeur of the hopes which they sacrifice, and upon the igno- 
miny of the life which they lead. But, alas! their eyes are 
opened to the light, only to be closed again in an instant; and 
the sole fruit which they reap, from the truth which is visible 
to, and enlightens them, is that of adding to the misfortune of 
having hitherto been ignorant of it, the guilt of having after- 
wards known it in vain. 

Some confine themselves to vain reasonings upon the light 
which strikes them, and turn truth into a subject of controversy 
in vain philosophy; others, with minds yet unsettled, wish, it 
would appear to know it; but they seek it not in an effectual 
way, because they would at bottom, be heartily sorry to have 
found it; lastly, others, more tractable, allow themselves to be 
wrought upon by its evidence, but, discouraged by the difficul- 
ties and the self-denials which it presents to them, they receive 
it not with that delight and that gratitude which, when once 
known, it inspires. And behold the rocks, which the disposi- 
tions of the sages of the east towards that light of Heaven, 
which comes to show new routes to them, teach us to shun. 

Accustomed, in consequence of a public profession of wisdom 
and philosophy, to investigate every thing, and reduce it to the 
judgment of a vain reason, and to be far above all popular pre- 
judices, they stop not, however, before commencing their jour- 
ney, upon the faith of the celestial light, to examine if the ap- 
pearance of this new star might not be solved by natural causes ; 
they do not assemble from every quarter scientific men, in order 
to reason on an event so uncommon; they sacrifice no time to 



464 



FOR THE DAY 



[Serm. XXVII. 



vain difficulties, whicli generally arise, more from the repug- 
nance we feel to truth, than from a sincere desire of enlighten- 
ing ourselves, and of knowing it. Instructed by that tradition 
of their fathers which the captive Israelites had formerly car- 
ried into the east, and which Daniel and so many other pro- 
phets had announced there, relative to the Star of Jacob which 
should one day appear, they at once comprehended, that the 
vain reflections of the human mind have no connexion with 
the light of heaven; that the portion of light which Heaven 
shows them is sufficient to determine and to conduct them; 
that grace always leaves obscurities in the ways to which it 
calls us, in order not to deprive faith of the merit of submis- 
sion; and that, whenever we are so happy as to catch a single 
gleam of truth, the uprightness of the heart ought to supply 
whatever deficiency may yet remain in the evidence of the 
light. 

Nevertheless, how many souls in the world, wavering upon 
faith, or rather enslaved by passions which render doubtful to 
them that truth which condemns them; how many souls, thus 
floating, clearly see, that, at bottom, the religion of our fa- 
thers hath marks of truth which the most high-flown and proud- 
est reason would not dare to deny to it; that unbelief leads to 
too much; that, after all, we must hold to something; and, 
that total unbelief is a choice still more incomprehensible to 
reason than the mysteries which shock it; who see it, and who 
struggle, by endless disputes, to lull that worm of the con- 
science whicli incessantly reproaches their error and their folly; 
who resist that truth, which proves itself in the bottom of their 
heart, under the pretence of enlightening themselves; who ap- 
ply for advice only that they may say to themselves, that their 
doubts are unanswerable; who have recourse to the most learn- 
ed, only to have the power of alleging, as a fresh motive of un- 
belief, the having had recourse in vain? It would seem that 
religion is no longer but a matter of discourse; it is no longer 
considered as that important affair in which not a moment is to 
be lost; it is a simple matter of controversy, as formerly in the 
Areopagus; it fills up the idle time; it is one of those unim- 
portant questions which fill up the vacancies of conversation, 
and amuse the langour and the vanity of general intercourse. 

But, my brethren, " the kingdom of God cometh not with 
observation." Truth is not the fruit of controversy and dis- 
pute, but of tears and groanings; it is by purifying our heart 
in meditation and in prayer that we alone must expect, like the 
magi, the light of Heaven, and to become worthy of distinguish- 
ing and knowing it. A corrupted heart, says St. Augustin, 
may see the truth; but he is incapable of relishing or of loving 
it; in vain do you enlighten and instruct yourselves: your 
doubts are in your passions: religion will become evident and 
clear from the moment that you shall become chaste, temperate, 



Serm. XXVIL] OF THE EPIPHANY. 



465 



and equitable; and you will have faith from the moment that 
you shall cease to have vice. Consequently, from the instant 
that you cease to have an interest in finding religion false, you 
will find it incontestable; no longer hate its maxims, and you 
will no longer contest its mysteries. 

Augustin himself, already convinced of the truth of the gos- 
pel, still found, in the love of pleasure, a source of doubts and 
perplexities which checked him. It was no longer the dreams 
of the Manicheans which kept him removed from faith: he was 
fully sensible of their absurdity and fanaticism; it was no longer 
the pretended contradictions of our holy books; Ambrose had 
explained their purport and their adorable mysteries. Never- 
theless, he still doubted; the sole thought of having to renounce 
his shameful passions in becoming a disciple of faith, rendered 
it still suspicious to him. He would have wished either that 
the doctrine of Jesus Christ had been an imposition, or that it 
had not condemned his voluptuous excesses, without which, in- 
deed, he was then unable to comprehend how either a happy 
or a comfortable life could be led. Thus, always floating and 
unwilling to be settled; continually consulting, yet dreading 
to be instructed; by turns the disciple and admirer of Ambrose, 
and racked by the perplexities of a heart which shunned the 
truth, he dragged his chain, as he says himself, dreading to be 
delivered from it; he continued to start doubts merely to pro- 
long his passions, he wished to be yet more enlightened, be- 
cause he dreaded to be it too much; and, more the slave of his 
passions than of his errors, he rejected truth, which manifested 
itself to him, merely because he looked upon it as a victorious 
and irresistible hand which was at last come to break asunder 
those fetters which he still loved. The light of heaven finds, 
therefore, no doubts to dissipate in the minds of the magi, be- 
cause it finds no passions in their hearts to overcome; and they 
well deserve to be the first-fruits of the Gentiles, and the first 
disciples of that faith which was to subjugate all nations to the 
gospel. 

Not but it is often necessary to add, to our own light, the 
approbation of those who are established, to distinguish whether 
it be the right spirit which moves us; fallacy is so similar to 
truth, that it is not easy to avoid being sometimes deceived. 
Thus the magi, in order to be more surely confirmed in the 
truth of the prodigy which guides their steps, come straight to 
Jerusalem: they consult the priests and the scribes, as the only 
persons capable of discovering to them that truth which they 
seek; they boldly and openly demand, in the midst of that 
great city, "Where is he that is born King of the Jews?" They 
propose their question with no palliations calculated to attract 
an equivocal answer: they are determined to be enlightened, and 
wish not to be flattered; from their heart they seek the truth, 
and, fpr that reason, they find it, 

Gg 



466 



FOR THE DAY 



[Skrm. XXVII. 



New disposition, sufficiently rare among believers. Alas! 
we find not truth, because we never seek it with a sincere and 
upright heart; we diffuse a kind of mist over every attempt to 
find it, which conceals it from our view: we consult, but we 
place our passions in so favourable a light, we hold them out in 
colours so softened, and so similar to the truth, that we pro- 
cure a reply of its being really so: we wish not to be instruct- 
ed; we wish to be deceived, and to add, to the passion which 
enslaves us, an authority which may calm us. 

Such is the illusion of the majority of men, and frequently 
even of those who, become contrite, have quitted the errors of 
a worldly life. Yes, my brethren, let us search our own hearts, 
and we shall find, that, however sincere our conversion may 
otherwise be, yet there is always within us some particular 
point, some secret and privileged attachment, upon which we 
are not candid; upon which we never but very imperfectly in- 
struct the guide of our conscience; upon Avhich, we seek not 
with sincerity the truth; upon which, in a word, it would even 
grieve us to have found it : and from thence it is, that the weak- 
nesses of the pious and good always furnish so many traits to 
the derision of the worldly; from thence we attract upon vir- 
tue continual reproaches and censures, which ought to light 
only upon ourselves. Nevertheless, to hear us speak, we love 
the truth; we are desirous of having it shown to us. But a 
convincing proof of that being only a vain mode of speaking, is, 
that whatever concerns, or has any illusion to this cherished 
passion, is carefully avoided by all around us; our friends are 
silent upon it; our superiors are obliged to use an artful deli- 
cacy, not to injure our feelings; our inferiors are upon their 
guard, and employ continual precautions; we are never spoken 
to, but with lenitives which draw a veil over our sore; we are 
almost the only persons ignorant of our defect: the whole world 
sees it, yet no one has the courage to make it known to our- 
selves: it is clearly seen that we seek not with sincerity the 
truth; and that, far from curing us, the hand, which should 
dare to probe our sore, would only succeed in making a fresh 
one. 

David knew not, and respected not the sanctity of Nathan, 
till after that prophet had spoken to him with sincerity, of the 
scandal of his conduct; from that day, and ever afterwards, he 
considered him as his father and deliverer; but, with us, a per- 
son loses all his merit from the moment that he has forced us 
to know ourselves. Before that, he was enlightened, prudent, 
full of charity; he possessed every talent calculated to attract 
esteem and confidence; the John the Baptists were listened to 
with pleasure, as formerly by an incestuous king: but, from 
the moment that they have undisguisedly spoken to us; from 
the moment that they have said to us, "It is not lawful for 
thee," they are stripped, in our opinion, of all their grand qua- 



Serm. XXVII.] OF THE EPIPHANY. 



lities: their zeal is no longer but whim; their charity but ail 
ostentation, or a desire to censure and contradict; their piety 
but an imprudence or a cheat, with which they cover their 
pride; their truth but a mistaken phantom. Thus, frequently 
convinced in our minds of the iniquity of our passions, we 
would wish others to give them their approbation; forced, by 
the inward testimony of the truth, to reproach them to our- 
selves, we cannot endure that they should be mentioned to us 
by others: we are hurt and irritated that others should join us 
against ourselves. Like Saul, we exact of the Samuels, that 
they approve, in public, what we inwardly condemn; and, 
through a corruption of the heart, perhaps more deplorable than 
our passions themselves, unable to silence truth in the bottom 
of our heart, we would wish to extinguish it in the hearts of all 
who approach us. I was right, therefore, in saying, that we 
all make a boast of loving the truth, but that few court it, like 
the magi, with an upright and a sincere heart. 

Thus, the little attention which they pay to the cfifnculties 
which seemed to dissuade them from that research, is a fresh 
proof of its sincerity and heartiness. For, my brethren, how 
singular must not this extraordinary step, which grace propo- 
sed to them, have at first appeared to their mind. They alone, 
of all their nation, among so many sages and learned men, with- 
out regard to friends and connexions, in spite of public obser- 
vations and derisions, while all others either contemn this mi- 
raculous star, or consider the attention paid to it, and the de- 
sign of these three sages, as an absurd undertaking and a po- 
pular weakness, unworthy of their mind and knowledge, they 
alone declare against the common opinion; they alone intrust 
themselves to the new guide which Heaven sends them; they 
alone abandon their country and their children, and reckon, as 
nothing, a singularity, the necessity and wisdom of which the 
celestial light discloses to them. 

Last instruction. The cause, my brethren, of truth being 
always unavailingly shown to us, is, that we judge not of it by 
the lights which it leaves in our soul, but by the impression 
which it makes on the rest of men with whom we live: we ne- 
ver consult the truth in our heart; we consult only the opinions 
which others have of it. Thus, in vain doth the light of Hea- 
ven a thousand times intrude upon us, and point out the ways 
in which we ought to go; the very first glance which we after- 
wards cast upon the example of others who live like us, revives 
us, and spreads a fresh mist over our heart. In those fortu- 
nate moments when we consult the sole truth of our own con- 
science, we condemn ourselves; we tremble over a futurity; 
we promise to ourselves a new life; yet, a moment after when 
returned to the world, and no longer consulting but the gene- 
ral example, we justify ourselves, and regain that false security 
which we had lost. We have no confidence in the truth which 



468 FOR THE J) AY [Serm. XXVII. 

the common example disproves; we sacrifice it to error and to 
the public opinion; it becomes suspicious to us, because it has 
chosen out us alone to favour with its light, and the very singu- 
larity of the blessing is the cause of our ingratitude and opposi- 
tion. We cannot comprehend, that to work out our salvation, 
is to distinguish ourselves from the rest of men; is to live 
single amidst the multitude; is to be an individual supporter of 
our own cause, in the midst of a world which either condemns 
or despises us: is, in a word, to count examples as nothing, and 
to be affected by our duty alone. We cannot comprehend, that, 
to devote ourselves to destruction, it requires only to live as 
others do; to conform to the multitude; to form with it only " 
one body and one world; seeing the world is already judged; 
that it is that body of the antichrist which shall perish with its 
head and members; that criminal city, accursed and condemn- 
ed to an eternal anathema. Yes, my brethren, the greatest ob- 
stacle in our hearts, to grace and truth, is the public opinion. 
How many timid souls, who have not the courage to adopt the 
righteous side, merely because the world, to whose view they 
are exposed, would join against them ! Thus, the king of As- 
syria durst not declare himself for the God of Daniel, because 
the grandees of his court would have reprobated such a step. 
How many weak souls, who, disgusted with pleasures, only 
continue to pursue them through a false honour, and that they 
may not distinguish themselves from those who set an example 
of them ! Thus, Aaron, in the midst of the Israelites, danced 
around the golden calf, and joined them in offering up incense 
to the idol which he detested, because he had not the courage, 
singly, to resist the public error and blindness. Fools that we 
are! it is the sole example of the public which confirms us 
against truth; as if men were our truth, or that it were upon 
the earth, and not in heaven, that we ought, like the magi, to 
search for that rule and that light which are to guide us. 

It is true, that, frequently, it is not respect for the world's 
opinion, but the sufferings and self-denials it holds out to us, 
which extinguish truth in our heart: thus, it makes us sorrow- 
ful like that young man of the gospel, and we do not receive it 
with that delight testified by the magi on seeing the miraculous 
star. They had beheld the magnificence of Jerusalem, the pomp 
of its buildings, the majesty of its temple, the splendour and 
grandeur of Herod's court; but the gospel makes no mention 
of their having been affected by that vain display of human 
pomp: they beheld all these grand objects of desire without at- 
tention, pleasure, or any exeterior marks of admiration or sur- 
prise; they express no wish to view the treasures and the riches 
of the temples as those ambassadors from Babylon formerly did 
to Hezekiah: solely taken up with the light of Heaven mani- 
fested to them, they have no eyes for any earthly object; feel- 
ing to the truth alone which has enlightened them, every thing 



Serm. XXVIL] OF THE EPIPHANY. 



469 



else is an object of indifference, or a burden to them; and their 
heart, viewing all things in their proper light, no longer acknow- 
ledges either delight, interest, or consolation to be found in any 
thing but the truth. 

On our part, my brethren, the first rays of truth which the 
goodness of God shed on our heart, probably excited a sensible 
delight. The project which we at first formed of a new life; 
the novelty of the lights which shone upon us, and upon which 
we had not as yet fully opened our eyes; the lassitude itself, 
and disgust of those passions of which our heart now felt only 
the bitterness and the punishment; the novelty of the occupa- 
tions which we proposed to ourselves in a change; all these of- 
fered smiling images to our fancy; for novelty itself is pleasing: 
but this, as the gospel says, was only the joy of a season. In 
proportion as truth drew near, it assumed to us, as to Augus- 
tin, yet a sinner, an appearance less captivating and smiling. 
When, after our first glance, as I may say, of it, we had lei- 
surely and minutely examined the various duties it prescribed 
to us; the grievous separations which were now to be a law to 
us; retirement, prayer, the self-denials which it proved to be 
indispensable; that serious, occupied, and private life in which 
we were to be engaged: ah! we immediately, like the young 
man of the gospel, began to draw back sorrowful and uneasy; 
all our passions roused up fresh obstacles to it; every thing now 
presented itself in gloomy and totally different colours; and that, 
which we had at first thought to be so attractive, when brought 
near, was no longer in our eyes but a frightful object, a way 
rugged, terrifying, and impracticable to human weakness. 

Where are the souls, who, like the magi, after having once 
known the truth, never afterwards wish to see but it alone; 
have no longer eyes for the world, for its empty pleasures, or 
for the vanity of its pompous shows; who feel no delight but in 
the contemplation of truth; in making it their resource in every 
affliction; the spur of their indolence; their succour against 
temptation; and the purest delight of their soul? And how 
vain, puerile, and disgusting doth the world, with all its plea- 
sures, hopes, and grandeurs, indeed appear to a soul who hath 
known thee, O my God ! and who hath felt the truth of thine 
eternal promises; to a soul who feels that whatever is not thee 
is unworthy of him; and who considers the earth only as the 
country of those who must perish for ever ! Nothing is consola- 
tory to him but what opens the prospect of real and lasting 
riches; nothing appears worthy of his regard but what is to en- 
dure for ever; nothing has the power of pleasing him but what 
shall eternally please him; nothing is longer capable of attach- 
ing him but that which he is no more to lose; and all the trifling 
objects of vanity are no longer, on his part, but the embarrass- 
ments of his piety, or gloomy monuments which recal the re- 
membrance of his crimes, 



470 



FOR THE DAY [Serm. XXVII. 



Behold, in the instance of the magi, truth received with sub- 
mission, with sincerity, and with delight; in the conduct of the 
priests let us see the truth dissembled; and, after being instruct- 
ed in the use which we ought to make of truth with regard to 
ourselves, let us learn what is our duty, respecting it, to others. 

Part II. The first duty required of us by the law of charity 
towards our brethren, is the duty of truth. We are not bound 
to bestow on all men our attentions, our cares, and our officious 
services: to all we owe the truth. The different situations in 
which rank and birth place us in the world, diversify our duties 
with regard to our fellow creatures; in every situation of life 
that of truth is the same. We owe it to the great equally as 
to the humble; to our subjects as to our masters; to the lovers 
of it as to those who hate it; to those who mean to employ it 
against ourselves as to those who wish it only for their own 
benefit. There are conjunctures in which prudence permits to 
hide and to dissemble the love which we bear for our brethren; 
none can possibly exist in which we are permitted to dissemble 
the truth: in a word, truth is not our own property, we are 
only its witnesses, its defenders, and its depositaries. It is that 
spark; that light of God, which should illuminate the whole 
world; and, when we dissemble or obscure it, we are unjust to- 
wards our brethren, and ungrateful towards the Father of Light 
who hath spread it through our soul. 

Nevertheless, the world is filled with dissemblers of the truth : 
We live, it would appear, only to deceive each other; and so- 
ciety, the first bond of which ought to be truth, is no long- 
er but a commerce of dissimulation, duplicity, and cunning. 
Now, in the conduct of the priests of our gospel, let us view all 
the different kinds of dissimulation of which men render them- 
selves every day culpable towards truth; we shall there find a 
dissimulation of silence, a dissimulation of compliance and pal- 
liation, a dissimulation of disguise and falsehood. 

A dissimulation of silence. Consulted by Herod on the 
place on which the Christ was to be born, they made answer, 
it is true, that Bethlehem was the place marked in the prophets 
for the fulfilment of that grand event; but they add not, that 
the star foretold in the holy books, having at last appeared, and the 
kings of Saba and of Arabia coming with presents to worship 
the new chief who was to lead Israel, it was no longer to be 
doubted that the overshadowed had at last brought forth the 
righteous. They do not gather together the people, in order to 
announce this blessed intelligence; they do not run first to 
Bethlehem, in order, by their example, to animate Jerusalem. 
Wrapt up in their criminal timidity, they guard a profound 
silence — they iniquitously retain the truth; and while strangers 
come from the extremities of the east, loudly to proclaim in Jeru- 
salem that the king of the Jews is born, the priests, the scribes. 



Serm. XXVIL] OF THE EPIPHANY. 



471 



are silent, and sacrifice, to the ambition of Herod, the interests 
of truth, the dearest hope of their nation, and the honour of 
their ministry. 

What a shameful degradation of the ministers of truth! The 
good-will of the prince influences them more than the sacred 
deposit of the religion with which they are intrusted; the lustre 
of the throne stifles, in their heart, the light of Heaven; by a 
criminal silence they flatter a king who applies to them for the 
truth, and who can learn it from them alone; they confirm 
him in error by concealing that which might have undeceived 
him; and how, indeed, shall truth ever make its way to the 
ear of sovereigns, if even the Lord's anointed, who surround 
the throne, have not the courage to announce it, but join their 
efforts, with those who dwell in courts, to conceal and stifle it? 

But this duty, my brethren, is, in certain respects, common 
to you as to us; yet, nevertheless, there are few persons in the 
world, even of those who set an example of piety, who do not, 
almost every day, render themselves culpable, towards their 
brethren, of the dissimulation of silence. They think that they 
render to truth all that they owe to it, when they do not declare 
against it; when they hear virtue continually decried by the 
worldly, the docrine of the world maintained, its abuses and 
maxims justified, those of the gospel opposed or weakened, the 
wicked often blaspheming what they know not, and setting 
themselves up as judges of that faith which shall judge them; 
that they listen to them, I say, without joining in their impiety, 
is true, but they do not boldly show their disapprobation, and 
content themselves with merely not authorising their blas- 
phemies, or their prejudices by their suffrage. 

Now, I say that, being all individually intrusted with the in- 
terests of truth, to be silent when it is openly attacked in our 
presence, is to become, in a measure, its persecutor and adver- 
sary, But, I add, that you, above ail whom God hath enlight- 
ened, you then fail in that love which you owe to your breth- 
ren, seeing your obligations with regard to them augment in 
proportion to the grace with which God hath favoured you; 
you also render yourselves culpable towards God of ingratitude ; 
you do not make a proper return for the blessing of grace and 
of truth with which he hath favoured you in the midst of your 
extravagant passions. He hath illuminated your darkness; he 
hath recalled you to himself, while wandering in treacherous 
and inkjuitous ways; he, no doubt, in thus shedding light 
through your heart, hath not had your benefit alone in view; he 
hath meant that it should operate as the instruction or as the 
reproach of your connexions, your friends, your subjects, or 
your masters; he hath intended to favour your age, your nation, 
your country in favouring you; for his chosen are formed only 
for the salvation or the condemnation of sinners. His design 
has been to place in you a light which might shine amid the sur-. 



472 



FOR THE DAY [Serm. XXVII. 



rounding darkness, and be a salutary guide to your fellow- 
creatures; which might perpetuate truth among men, and ren- 
der testimony to the righteousness and to the wisdom of his law, 
amidst all the prejudices and all the vain conclusions of a pro- 
fane world. 

Now, by opposing only a cowardly and timid silence to the 
maxims which attack the truth, you do not enter into the views of 
God's mercy upon your brethren ; you render unavailing to his 
glory and to the aggrandisement of his kingdom, that talent of 
the truth which he had intrusted to you, and of which he will 
one day demand a particular and severe reckoning; I say, more 
particularly of you who had formerly, with so much eclat, sup- 
ported the errors and profane maxims of the world, and who had 
once been its firmest and most avowed apologist. He surely 
had a right to exact of you, that you should declare yourselves 
with the same courage in favour of truth: nevertheless, from a 
zealous partisan of the world, his grace hath only succeeded in 
making a timid disciple of the gospel. That grand air of con- 
fidence and of intrepidity with which you formerly apologised 
for the passions, has forsaken you ever since you have under- 
taken the defence of the interests of virtue: that audacity which 
once imposed silence on truth, is now itself mute in the pre- 
sence of error; and truth, which, as St. Augustin says, gives 
confidence and intrepidity to all who have it on their side, has 
rendered you only weak and timid. 

I admit, that there is a time to be silent as well as a time to 
speak; and that the zeal of truth hath its rules and measures; 
but I would not that the souls, who know God and serve him 
continually, hear the maxims of religion subverted, the reputa- 
tion of their brethren attacked, the most criminal abuses of the 
world justified, without having the courage to adopt the cause 
of that truth which they dishonour. I would not that the world 
have its avowed partisans, and that Jesus Christ have no one to 
stand up for him. I would not that the pious and good, through 
a mistaken idea of good-breeding, dissemble upon those irregu- 
larities of sinners which they are daily witnessing; while sinners, 
on the contrary, consider it as giving themselves an important 
and fashionable air, to defend and to maintain them in their 
presence. I would that a faithful soul comprehend that he is 
responsible to the truth alone; that he is upon the earth solely 
to render glory to the truth: I would that he bear upon his 
countenance that noble, and, I may say. lofty dignity, which 
grace inspires; that heroical candour which contempt of the 
world and all its glory produces; that generous and Christian 
liberty, which expects only eternal riches, which has no hope but 
in God, which dreads nothing but the internal Judge, which 
pays court to, and spares nothing but the interests of righteous- 
ness and of charity, and which has no wish of making itself 
agreeable but by the truth. I would that the sole presence of 



Serm. XXVIL] OF THE EPIPHANY. 



473 



a righteous soul impose silence on the enemies of virtue; that 
they respect that character of truth which he should bear en- 
graven on his forehead; that they crouch under his holy great- 
ness of soul, and that they render homage, at least by their si- 
lence and their confusion, to that virtue which they inwardly 
despise. Thus, the Israelites, taken up with their dances, their 
profane rejoicings, and their foolish and impious shouts around 
the golden calf, stop all in a moment, and keep profound silence 
on the sole appearance of Moses, who comes down from the 
mountain armed with the law of the Lord and with his eternal 
truth. First dissimulation of the truth: a dissimulation of 
silence. 

The second manner in which it is dissembled, is that of soft- 
ening it by modifications, and by condescensions which injure 
it. The magi, no doubt, could not be ignorant that the intelli- 
gence which they came to announce to Jerusalem would be high- 
ly displeasing to Herod. That foreigner, through his artifices had 
seated himself on the throne of David; he did not so peaceably 
enjoy the fruit of his usurpation, but that he constantly had a 
dread lest some heir of the blood of the kings of Judah should 
expel him from the heritage of his father, and remount a throne 
promised to his posterity. With what eye must he then regard 
men who come to publish, in the midst of Jerusalem, that the 
King of the Jews is born, and to proclaim him to a people so 
attached to, and so zealous for the blood of David, and so im- 
patient under every foreign rule ? Neverthless, the magi conceal 
nothing of what they had seen in the east: they do not soften 
that grand event by measured expressions less proper to arouse 
the jealousy of Herod. They might have called the Messiah 
whom they seek, the Messenger of Heaven, or the longed-for of 
nations; they might have designed him by titles less hateful to 
the ambition of Herod; but, full of the truth which had appear- 
ed to them, they know none of these timid and servile time- 
servings; persuaded that those, who are determined to receive 
the truth only through the means of their errors, are unworthy 
of knowing it. They are unacquainted with the art of covering 
it with disguises and considerations for individuals which dis- 
honour it: they boldly come to the point, and demand, " Where 
is he that is born King of the Jews?" and, not satisfied with consi- 
dering him as the Sovereign of Judea, they declare that heaven 
itself is his birthright; that the stars are his and make their 
appearance in the firmament only in obedience to his orders. 

The priests and scribes, on the contrary, forced, by the evi- 
dence of the Scriptures, to render glory to the truth, soften it by 
guarded expressions. They endeavour to unite that respect 
which they owe to the truth, with that complaisance which they 
wish still to preserve for Herod; they suppress the title of king, 
which the magi had given to him, and which had so often been 
bestowed by the prophets upon the Messiah; they design him 



474 



FOR THE DAY [Serm. XXVII. 



by a title which might equally mark an authority of doctrine 
or of superior power; they announce him rather as a legislator 
established to regulate the manners, than as a sovereign raised 
up for the deliverance of his people from bondage. And not- 
withstanding that they themselves expect a Messiah, King, and 
Conqueror, they soften the truth which they wish to announce, 
and complete the blindness of Herod, with whom they tem- 
porise. 

Deplorable destiny of the great ! the lips of the priests quiver 
in speaking to them; from the moment that their passions are 
known they are temporised with; truth never offers itself to 
them but with a double face, of which one side is always favour- 
able to them; the servants of God wish not avowedly to betray 
their ministry and the interests of truth; but they wish to con- 
ciliate them with their own interest: they endeavour to save, 
as it were, both the rule and their passions, as if the passions 
could subsist with that rule which condemns them. It seldom 
happens that the great are instructed, because it seldom happens 
that the intention is not to please in instructing them. Never- 
theless, the greater part would love the truth were it once known 
to them: the passions and the extravagancies of the age, nour- 
ished by all the pleasures which surround them, may lead them 
astray; but a remaining principle of religion renders truth al- 
ways respectable to them. We may venture to say, that igno- 
rance condemns more princes and persons of high rank than peo- 
ple of the lowest condition; and that the mean complaisance 
which is paid to them is more dishonourable to the ministry, 
and is the cause of more reproach to religion, than the most 
notorious scandals which afflict the church. 

The conduct of these priests appears base to you, my brethren: 
but, if you are disposed to enter into judgment with yourselves, 
and to follow yourselves through the detail of your duties, of 
your friendships, of your conversations, you will see that all 
your discourses and all your proceedings are merely mollifica- 
tions of the truth, and temporisings, in order to reconcile it with 
the prejudices or the passions of those with whom it is your 
lot to live. We never hold out the truth to them but in a point of 
view in which it may please; in their most despicable vices we al- 
ways find some favourable side; and, as all the passions have al- 
ways some apparent assemblance to some virtue, we never fail 
to save ourselves through the assistance of that resemblance. 

Thus, in the presence of an ambitious person, we never fail to 
hold forth the love of glory and the desire of exalting one's self, 
only as tendencies which give birth to great men; we flatter 
his pride; we inflame his desires with hopes and with false and 
chimerical predictions; we nourish the error of his imagination 
by bringing phantoms within his reach, upon which he incessant- 
ly feasts himself. We perhaps venture, in general terms, to 
pity men who interest themselves so deeply for things which 



Seem. XXVIL] OF THE EPIPHANY. 



475 



chance alone bestows, and of which death shall perhaps deprive 
us to-morrow; but we have not the courage to censure the mad- 
man, who, to that vapour, sacrifices his quiet, his life, and his 
conscience. With a vindictive person we justify his resentment 
and anger; we justify his guilt in his mind, by countenancing 
the justice of his accusations; we spare his passion in exaggera- 
ting the injury and fault of his enemy. We perhaps venture to 
say, how noble it is to forgive; but we have not the courage to 
add, that the first step towards forgiveness is the ceasing to speak 
of the injury received. 

With a courtier equally discontented with his own fortune, and 
jealous of that of others, we never fail to expose his rivals in 
the most unfavourable light: we artfully spread a cloud over 
their merit and their glory, lest they should injure the jealous 
eyes of him who listens to us; we diminish, we cast a shade 
over the fame of their talents and of their services; and, by our 
iniquitous crouchings to his passion, we nourish it, we assist 
him in blinding himself, and induce him to consider, as honours 
unjustly ravished from himself, all those which are bestowed 
upon his brethren. What shall I say? With a prodigal, his 
profusions are no longer, in our mouths, but a display of gen- 
erosity and magnificence. With a miser, his sordid callousness 
of heart, in which every feeling is lost, is no longer but a prudent 
moderation, and a laudable domestic economy. With a person 
of high rank, his prejudices and his errors always find in us 
ready apologies; we respect his passions equally as his authority, 
and his prejudices always become our own. Lastly, We catch 
the infection, and imbibe the errors of all with whom we live; 
we transform ourselves, as I may say, into other selves; our 
grand study is to find out their weaknesses, that we may ap- 
propriate and apply them to our own purposes: we have, in 
fact, no language of our own; we always speak the language 
of others; our discourses are merely a repetition of their pre- 
judices; and this infamous debasement of truth we call know- 
ledge of the world, a prudence which knows its own interest, 
the grand art of pleasing and of succeeding in the world. O 
ye sons of men! how " long will ye love vanity, and seek after 
leasing?" 

Yes, my brethren, by that we perpetuate error among men; 
we authorise every deceit; we justify every false maxim; we 
give an air of innocence to every vice; we maintain the reign 
of the world, and of its doctrine, against that of Jesus Christ; 
we corrupt society, of which truth ought to be the first tie; we 
pervert those duties and mutual offices of civil life, established 
to animate us to virtue, into snares, and inevitable occasions of 
a departure from righteousness; we change friendship, which 
ought to be a grand resource to us against our errors and irregu- 
larities, into a commerce of dissimulation and mutual deception : 
by that, in a word, we render truth hateful and ridiculous by 



476 



FOR THE DAY [Serm. XXVII. 



rendering it rare among men; and, when I say we, I mean 
more especially the souls who belong to God, and who are in- 
trusted with the interests of truth upon the earth. Yes, my 
brethren, I would that faithful souls had a language peculiar to 
them amid the world; that other maxims, other sentiments 
were found in them than in the rest of men; and while all 
others speak the language of the passions, that they alone speak 
the language of truth. I would that, while the world hath its 
Balaams, who, by their discourses and councils, authorise ir- 
regularity and licentiousness, piety had its Phineases, who durst 
boldly adopt the interests of the law of God, and of the sanctity 
of its maxims; that, while the world hath its impious philoso- 
phers and false sages, who think that it does them honour open- 
ly to proclaim that we ought to live only for the present, and 
that the end of man is, in no respect, different from that of the 
beast, piety had its Solomons, who, undeceived by their own ex- 
perience, durst publicly avow, that, excepting the fear of the 
Lord and the observance of his commandments, all else is vanity 
and vexation of spirit; that while the world hath its charms and 
enchantments, which seduce kings and the people by their delu- 
sions and flatteries, piety had its Moseses and Aarons, who had 
the courage to confound, by the sole force of truth, their im- 
position and artifice ; in a word, that, while the world hath its 
priests and its scribes, who, like those of the gospel, weaken the 
truth, piety had its magi, who dread not to announce, it in the 
presence even of those to whom it cannot but be displeasing. 

Not that I condemn the modifications of a sage prudence, 
which apparently gives up something to the prejudices of men, 
only that it may more surely recal them to rule and duty. I 
know that truth loves neither rash nor indiscreet defenders; 
that the passions of men require a certain difference and ma- 
nagement; that they are in the situation of sick persons, to 
whom it is often necessary to disguise and render palatable their 
medicines, and to cure them without their privity. I know that 
all deferences paid to the passions, when their tendency is to 
establish the truth, are not weakeners, but auxiliaries of it; 
and that the grand rule of the zeal of truth, is prudence and 
charity. But such is not the intention when they weaken it by 
flattering and servile adulations: they seek to please, and not 
to edify; they substitute themselves in the place of truth; and 
their sole wish is to attract those sufferings which are due to it 
alone. And, let it not be said that it is more through sourness 
and ostentation, than through charity, that the just claim a 
merit in disdaining to betray truth. The world, which is al- 
ways involved in deceit, of which the commerce and mutual 
ties revolve only upon dissimulation and artifice, which consi- 
ders these even as an honourable science, and which is totally 
unacquainted with this noble rectitude of heart, cannot suppose 
it in others; it is its profound corruption which is the cause of 



Seem. XXVIL] OF THE EPIPHANY. 



477 



its suspecting the sincerity a|nd the courage of the upright: it 
is a mode of acting which appears ridiculous, because it is new 
to it; and, as it finds in it so marked a singularity, it loves bet- 
ter to suppose that it is rather the consequence of pride, or folly, 
than of virtue. 

From thence it is that the truth is not only disguised, but it 
is likewise openly betrayed. Last dissimulation of the priests 
of our gospel: a dissimulation of falsehood. They are not sa- 
tisfied with quoting the prophecies in obscure and mollified 
terms: but, seeing that the magi did not return to Jerusalem, 
as they had intended, they add, no doubt in order to calm He- 
rod, that, ashamed of not having been able to find that new 
King of whom they came in search, they have not had the cou- 
rage to return: that they are strangers little versed in the know- 
ledge of the law and of the prophets; and that the light of Hea- 
ven, which they pretended to follow, was nothing but a vulgar 
illusion, and a superstitious prejudice of a rude and credulous 
nation. And such must indeed have been their language to 
Herod, since they themselves act according to it, and do not 
run to Bethlehem to seek the new-born King, in order, it ap- 
pears, to complete the persuasion of Herod, that there was 
more credulity than truth in the superstitious research of these 
magi. 

And behold to what we at last come: in consequence of a 
servile compliance with the passions of men, and of continually 
wishing to please them at the expense of truth, we at last openly 
abandon it; we cowardly and downrightly sacrifice it to our in- 
terest, our fortune, and our reputation; we betray our con- 
science, our duty, and our understanding; and, consequently, 
from the moment that truth becomes irksome to us, or renders 
us displeasing, we disavow it, and deliver it up to oppression 
and iniquity; like Peter, we deny that we have ever been seen 
as its disciple. In this manner we change our heart into a 
cowardly and grovelling one, to which any profitable falsehood 
costs nothing; into an artificial and pliable heart, which assumes 
every form, and never possesses any determinate one; into a 
weak and flattering heart, which has not the courage to refuse 
its suffrage to any thing but unprofitable and unfortunate vir- 
tue; into a corrupted and interested heart, which makes sub- 
servient to its purposes, religion, truth, justice, and all that is 
most sacred among men; in a word, a heart capable of every 
thing except that of being true, noble, and sincere. And think 
not that sinners of this description are so very rare in the world. 
We shun only the notoriety and shame of these faults; secret 
and secure basenesses find few scrupulous hearts; we often love 
only the reputation and glory of truth. 

\t is only proper to take care that, in pretending to defend 
the truth, we are not defending the mere illusions of our own 
mind. Pride, ignorance, and self-conceit, every day furnish 



FOR THE DAY [Sekm. XXVII. 



defenders to error, equally intrepid and obstinate as any of 
whom faith can boast. The only truth worthy of our love, of 
our zeal, and of our courage, is that held out to us by the 
church; for it alone we ought to endure every thing; beyond 
that, we are no longer but the martyrs of our own obstinacy 
and vanity. 

O my God ! pour then through my soul that humble and ge- 
nerous love of the truth, with which thy chosen are filled in 
heaven, and which is the only characteristic mark of the just 
upon the earth. Let my life be only such as to render glory 
to thine eternal truths; let me honour them through the sanc- 
tity of my manners; let me defend them through zeal for thy 
interests alone, and enable me continually to oppose them to 
error and vanity: annihilate in my heart those human fears, 
that prudence of the flesh which dreads to lay open to persons 
their errors and their vices. Suffer not that I be a feeble reed 
which bends to every blast, nor that I ever blush to bear the 
truth imprinted on my forehead, as the most illustrious title 
with which thy creature can glorify himself, and as the most 
glorious mark of thy mercies upon my soul. In effect, it is not 
sufficient to be the witness and depository of it, it is also neces- 
sary to be its defender: character contrasted with that of He- 
rod, who is, in our gospel at present, its enemy and persecu- 
tor. Last instruction with which our gospel furnishes us: the 
truth persecuted. 

Part III. If it is a crime to withstand the truth when it 
shines upon us, — iniquitously to withhold it when we owe it to 
others; it is the fullness of inqiuity, and the most distinguished 
character of reprobation, to persecute and combat it. Never- 
theless, nothing is more common in the world than this perse- 
cution of truth; and the impious Herod, who, on the present 
occasion, sets himself up against it, has more imitators than 
is supposed. 

For, in the first place, he persecutes it through that repug- 
nancy which he visibly shows to the truth, and which induces 
all Jerusalem to follow his example; and this is what I call a 
persecution of scandal. Secondly, He persecutes it by endea- 
vouring to corrupt the priests, and even by laying snares for 
the piety of the magi; and this is what I call a persecution of 
seduction. Lastly, He persecutes it by shedding innocent blood; 
and this is a persecution of power and violence. Now, my 
brethren, if the brevity of a discourse permitted me to examine 
these three descriptions of persecution of the truth, there is not 
perhaps one of them of which you would not find yourselves 
culpable. 

For, 1st, Who can flatter himself with not being among the 
number of the persecutors of truth, under the description of 
scandals? I even speak not of those disorderly souls who have 



Serm. XXVIL] OF THE EPIPHANY. 479 

erected the standard of guilt and licentiousness, and who pay 
little, if indeed any, attention to the public opinion: the most 
notorious scandals are not always those which are most to be 
dreaded; and avowed debauchery, when carried to a certain 
degree, occasions, in general, more censures upon our conduct 
than imitations of our excesses. I speak of those souls delivered 
up to the pleasures, to the vanities, and to all the abuses of the 
age, and whose conduct, in other respects regular, is not only 
irreproachable in the sight of the world, but attracts even the 
praises and the esteem of men; and I say that they persecute 
the truth through their sole examples; that they undo, as much 
as in them lies, the maxims of the gospel in every heart; that 
they cry out to all men, that shunning of pleasures is a needless 
precaution; that love of the world and the love of virtue are 
not at all incompatible; that a taste for theatres, for dress, and 
for all public amusements, is entirely innocent; and that it is 
easy to lead a good life even while living like the rest of the 
world. This worldly regularity is therefore a continual perse- 
cution of the truth; and so much the more dangerous, as it is 
an authorised persecution which has nothing odious in it, and 
against which no precaution is taken; which attacks the truth 
without violence, without effusion of blood, under the smiling 
image of peace and society: and which, through these means, 
occasions more deserters from the truth than ever all tyrants 
and tortures formerly did. 

I speak even of tkose good characters who only imperfectly 
fulfil the duties of piety, who still retain, too, public remains of 
the passions of the world and of its maxims: and, I say, that 
they persecute the truth through these unfortunate remains of 
infidelity and weakness; that they are the occasion of its being 
blasphemed by the impious and other sinners; that they autho- 
rise the senseless discourses of the world against the piety of the 
servants of God; that they are the cause of souls being disgusted 
with virtue, who might otherwise feel themselves disposed to it; 
that they confirm, in the path of error, those who seek pretexts to 
remain in it: in a word, that they render virtue either suspicious 
or ridieulous. Thus, still every day, as the Lord formerly com- 
plained, through his prophet Jeremiah, the backsliding Israel, 
that is to say, the world, justifies herself more than treacherous 
Judah, that is to say, the weaknesses of the good: I mean to 
say, that the world thinks itself secure when it sees that those 
souls, who profess piety, join in its pleasures and frivolities; are 
warm, like the rest of men, upon fortune, upon favour, upon 
preferences, and upon injuries; pursue their own ends, have 
still a desire of pleasing, eagerly seek after distinctions and fa- 
vours, and sometimes make even piety subservient towards more 
surely attaining them. Ah ! it is then that the world triumphs, 
and that it feels itself comforted in the comparison; it is then 
that, finding such a resemblance between the virtue of the good 



480 



FOR THE DAY [Serm. XXVII. 



and its own vices, it feels tranquil upon its situation, and thinks 
that it is needless to change, since, in changing the name, the 
same things are still retained. 

And it is here that I cannot prevent myself from saying, with 
the apostle Peter, to you whom God hath recalled from the 
ways of the world and of the passions, to those of truth and 
righteousness; let us act in such a manner among the worldly, 
that, in place of decrying virtue as they have hitherto done, and 
of despising or censuring those who practise it; the good works 
which they shall behold in us, our pure and holy manners, our 
patience under scorn, our wisdom and our circumspection in 
discourse, our modesty and humility in exaltation, our equality 
of mind and submission under disgrace, our gentleness towards 
our inferiors, our regard for our equals, our fidelity towards our 
masters, our universal charity towards our brethren, force them 
to render glory to God, make them to respect and even to envy 
the destiny of virtue, and dispose their hearts to receive the 
grace of light and of truth when it shall deign to visit them, 
and to enlighten them upon their erroneous ways. Let us shut 
up the mouth of all the enemies of virtue by the sight of an ir- 
reprehensible life: let us honour piety, that it may honour us: 
let us render it respectable if we wish to gain partisans to it: 
let us furnish to the world examples which condemn it, and not 
censures which justify it: let us accustom it to think, that god- 
liness is profitable unto all things, having promise not only of 
the life to come, but also peace, satisfaction, and content, which 
are the only good, and the only real pleasures of the present life. 

To this persecution of scandal, Herod adds a persecution of 
seduction: he tempts the sanctity and the fidelity of the mini- 
sters of the law: he wishes to make the zeal and the holy bold- 
ness of the magi instrumental to his impious designs: in a 
word, he neglects nothing to undo the truth before he openly 
attacks it. 

And behold a fresh manner in which we continually perse- 
cute the truth. In the first place, We weaken the piety of the 
just by accusing their fervour of excess, and by struggling to 
persuade them that they do too much; we exhort them, like 
the grand tempter, to change their stones into bread; that is to 
say, to abate from their austerity, and to change that retired, 
gloomy, and laborious life, into a more ordinary and comfort- 
able one: we give them room to dread that the sequel will not 
correspond with these beginnings; in a word, we endeavour to 
draw them nearer to us, being unwilling to raise ourselves to a 
level with them. 2dly, We perhaps tempt even their fidelity 
and their innocence, by giving the most animated descriptions 
of those pleasures from which they fly: like the wife of Job, 
we blame their simplicity and weakness: we exaggerate to them 
the inconveniences of virtue and the difficulties of perseverance: 
we shake them by the example of unfaithful souls, who, after 



Serm. XXVIL] OF THE EPIPHANY. 



481 



putting their hand to the plough, have cast a look behind, and 
abandoned their labour: What shall I say? We perhaps attack 
even the immoveable groundwork of faith, and we insinuate the 
inutility of the self-denials it proposes, from the uncertainty of 
its promises. 3dly, We harass by our authority, the zeal and 
the piety of those persons who are dependent upon us: we exact 
duties of them, either incompatible with their innocence or 
dangerous to their virtue: we place them in situations either 
painful or trying to their faith: we interdict them from prac- 
tices and observances, either necessary for their support in pie- 
ty, or profitable towards their progress in it: in a word, we 
become domestic tempters with respect to them, being neither 
capable of tasting good ourselves, nor of suffering it in others, 
and performing, towards these souls, the office of the demon, 
who only watches in order to destroy. Lastly, We render our- 
selves culpable of this persecution of seduction by making our 
talents instrumental to the destruction of the reign of Jesus 
Christ: the talents of the body in inspiring iniquitous passions; 
in placing ourselves in hearts where God alone ought to be; in 
corrupting the souls for whom Jesus Christ gave his blood: the 
talents of the mind in induciug to vice; in embellishing it with 
all the charms most calculated to hide its infamy and horror; 
in presenting the poison under the most alluring and seductive 
form; and in rendering it immortal by lascivious works, through 
the means of which a miserable author shall, to the end of ages, 
preach up vice, corrupt hearts, and inspire his brethren with 
every deplorable passion which had enslaved himself during life; 
shall see his punishment, and his torments increased in propor- 
tion as the impious fire he has lighted up shall spread upon the 
earth; shall have the shocking consolation of declaring himself, 
even after death, against his God, of gaining souls from him 
whom he had redeemed, of still insulting his holiness and ma- 
jesty, of perpetuating his own rebellion and disorders even be- 
yond the tomb, and of making, even to the fulfilment of time, 
the crimes of all men his own crimes. Wo, saith the Lord, to 
all those who rise up against my name and glory, and who lay 
snares for my people ! I will take vengeance of them on the day 
of my judgment: I will demand of them the blood of their bre- 
thren whom they have seduced, and whom they have caused to 
perish : and I will multiply upon them, and make them for ever 
to feel, the most dreadful evils, in return for that glory which 
they have ravished from me. 

But a last description of persecution, still more fatal to truth, 
is that which I call a persecution of power and violence. He- 
rod, having gained nothing by his artifices, at last throws off 
the mask, openly declares himself the persecutor of Jesus Christ, 
and wishes to extinguish in its birth that light which comes to 
illuminate the whole world. 

The sole mention of the cruelty of that impious prince strikes 

h h 



482 



FOR THE DAY [Serm. XXVIL 



us with horror; and it does not appear that so barbarous an ex- 
ample can ever find imitators among us: nevertheless, the world 
is full of these kinds of public and avowed persecutors of the 
truth: and, if the church be no longer afflicted with the barba- 
rity of tyrants, and with the effusion of her children's blood r 
she is still every day persecuted by the public derisions which 
the worldly make of virtue, and by the ruin of those faithful 
souls whom she, with grief, so often beholds sinking under the 
dread of their derisions and censures. 

Yes, my brethren, those discourses which you so readily al- 
low yourselves against the piety of the servants of God, of those 
souls who, by their fervent homages, recompense his glory for 
your crimes and insults; those derisions of their zeal and of 
their holy intoxication for their God; those biting sarcasms 
which rebound from their person upon virtue itself, and are the 
most dangerous temptation of their penitence; that severity, 
on their account, which forgives them nothing, and changes 
even their virtues into vices; that language of blasphemy and 
of mockery, which throws an air of ridicule over the serious- 
ness of their compunction; which gives appellations of irony 
and contempt to the most respectable practices of their piety; 
which shakes their faith, checks their holy resolutions, dis- 
heartens their weakness, makes them, as it were, ashamed of vir- 
tue, and often is the cause of their returning to vice: behold 
what, with the saints, I call an open and declared persecution 
of the truth. You persecute in your brother, says St Augustin, 
that which the tyrants themselves have never persecuted: they 
have deprived him only of life; your scheme is to deprive him 
of innocence and virtue: their persecution extended only to the 
body; you carry yours even to the destruction of his soul. 

What, my brethren ! is it not enough that you do not your- 
selves serve the God for whom you are created? (This is what 
the first defenders of faith, the Tertullians and the Cyprians, 
formerly said to the Pagan persecutors of the faithful; and must 
it be that we, alas ! have the same complaints to make against 
Christians?) Is it not enough? Must you also persecute those 
who serve him? You are then determined neither to adore him 
yourselves, nor to suffer that others do it? You eveiy day for- 
give so many extravagancies to the followers of the world, so 
many unreasonable passions; you excuse them; what do I say? 
You applaud them in the inordinate desires of their heart; in 
their most shameful passions you find constancy, fidelity, and 
dignity: You give honourable names to their most infamous 
vices; and it is a just and faithful soul alone, a servant of the 
true God, who has no indulgence to expect from you, and is 
certain of drawing upon himself your contempt and censures? 
But my brethren, theatrical and other amusements are pub- 
licly licensed, and nothing is said against them: the madness 
of gambling has its declared partisans, and they are quietly put 



Serm. XXVIL] OF THE EPIPHANY. 



483 



up with: ambition has its worshippers and slaves, and they are 
even commended: voluptuousness has its altars and victims, 
and no one contests them: avarice has its idolators, and not a 
word is said against them : all the passions, like so many sacri- 
legious divinities, have their established worship, without the 
smallest exception being taken; and the sole Lord of the uni- 
verse, and the Sovereign of all men, and the only God upon 
the earth, either shall not be served at all, or shall not be it 
with impunity? and without every obstacle being placed in the 
way of his service? 

Great God! avenge then thine own glory; render again to 
thy servants that honour and that lustre which the impious un- 
ceasingly ravish from them; do not, as formerly, send fero- 
cious beasts from the depths of then' forests to devour the con- 
temners of virtue and of the holy simplicity of thy prophets ; 
but deliver them up to their inordinate desires, still more cruel 
and insatiable than the lion or the bear, in order that, worn out, 
ranked by their internal convulsions and the frenzies of their 
own passions, they may know all the value and all the excel- 
lence of that virtue which they contemn, and aspire to the feli- 
city and to the destiny of those souls who serve thee. 

For, my brethren, you whom this discourse regards, allow 
me, and with grief, to say it here : Must you be the instruments 
which the demon employs to tempt the chosen of God, and, if 
it were possible, to lead them astray? Must it be that you ap- 
pear upon the earth merely in order to justify the prophecies of 
the holy books with regard to the persecutions, which, even to 
the end, are inevitable to all those who shall wish to live in 
godliness which is in Jesus Christ? Must you alone be the 
means of sustaining the perpetuity of that frightful succession 
of persecutors of faith and of virtue, which is to endure as long 
as the church? Must you, in default now of tyrants and of tor- 
tures, continue to be the rock and the scandal of the gospel ? 
Renounce, then, yourselves the hope which is in Jesus Christ; 
join yourselves with those barbarous nations, or with these im- 
pious characters who blaspheme his glory and his divinity, if to 
you it appears so worthy of derision and laughter to live under 
his laws, and according to his maxims. An infidel or a savage 
might suppose that we, who serve and who worship him, are 
under delusion: he might pity our credulity and weakness, 
when he sees us sacrificing the present to a futurity, and a 
hope which, in his eyes, might appear fabulous and chimerical; 
but he would be forced, at least, to confess, that, if we do not 
deceive ourselves, and if our faith be justly grounded, we are 
the wisest and the most estimable of all men. But for you, who 
would not dare to start a doubt of the certitude of faith, and of 
the hope which is in Jesus Christ, with what eyes, with what 
astonishment would that infidel regard the censures which you 
so plentifully bestow upon his servants? You prostrate your- 



484 



FOR THE DAY, &e. [Serm. XXVII. 



selves before his cross, he would say to you, as before the pledge 
of your salvation : and you laugh at those who bear it in their 
heart, and who ground their whole hope and expectation in it ! 
You worship him as your Judge; and you contemn and load 
with ridicule those who dread him, and who anxiously labour to 
render him favourable to their interests ! You believe him to be 
sincere and faithful in his word; and you look upon, as weak 
minds, those who place their trust in him, and who sacrifice 
every thing to the grandeur and to the certainty of his promises ! 
O man, so astonishing, so full of contradictions, so little in 
unison with thyself, would the infidel exclaim, how great and 
how holy must the God of the Christians therefore be, seeing 
that, among all those who know him, he hath no enemies but 
such as are of thy description! 

Let us, therefore, respect virtue, my brethren; let us ho- 
nour, in his servants, the gifts of God, and the wonders of his 
grace. Let us merit, by our deference and our esteem for pie- 
ty, the blessing of piety itself. Let us regard the worthy and 
pious as the souls who alone continue to draw down the favours 
of Heaven upon the earth, as resources established to reconcile 
us one day with God, as blessed signs, which prove to us that 
the Lord still looketh upon men with pity, and continueth his 
mercies upon his church. Let us encourage by our praises, if 
we cannot strengthen by our example, the souls who return to 
him: let us applaud their change, if we think it impossible, as 
yet, to change ourselves; let us glory in defending them, if our 
passions will not, as yet, permit us to imitate them. Let us 
reverence and esteem virtue. Let us have no friends but the 
friends of God: let us count upon the fidelity of men only in 
proportion as they are faithful to their Master and Creator: let 
us confide our sorrows and our sufferings only to those who can 
present them to him, who alone can console them: let us be- 
lieve to be in our real interests only those who are in the inte- 
rests of our salvation. Let us smooth the way to our conver- 
sion: let us, by our respect for the just, prepare the world to 
behold us one day, without surprise, just ourselves. Let us 
not, by our derisions and censures, raise up an invincible stum- 
bling-block of human respect, which shall for ever prevent us 
from declaring ourselves disciples of that piety which we have 
so loudly and so publicly decried. Let us render glory to the 
truth; and, in order that it may deliver us, let us religiously 
receive it, like the magi, from the moment that it is manifested 
to us: let us not dissemble it, like the priests, when we owe it 
to our brethren: let us not declare against it, like Herod, when 
we can no longer dissemble it to ourselves, in order that, after 
having walked in the ways of truth upon the earth, we may all 
together one day be sanctified in truth, and perfected in charity. 



Serm. XXVIII.] THE DIVINITY, &s. 



485 



SERMON XXVIIL 
THE DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST. 
Luke ii. 21. 

His name was called Jesus, which was so named of the angel. 

A God lowering himself so far as even to become man, asto- 
nishes and confounds reason; and into what an abyss of errors 
is it not plunged, if the light of faith come not speedily to its 
aid, to discover the depth of the divine wisdom concealed un- 
der the apparent absurdity of the mystery of a Man-God? Thus, 
in all times, this fundamental point of our holy religion, I mean 
the divinity of Jesus Christ, hath been the object most exposed 
to the foolish oppositions of the human mind. Men, full of 
pride, whose mouths ought to be filled with only thanksgivings 
for the ineffable gift, made to them by the Father of mercies, 
of his only Son, have continually insulted him, by vomiting 
forth the most impious blasphemies against that adorable Son. 
Full of blindness, who have not seen that the sole name of Je- 
sus, which is given to him on this day, that name which he at 
first receives in heaven, and which an angel conveys to the 
earth, to Mary and Joseph, is the incontestable proof of his di- 
vinity. That sacred name establishes him the Saviour of man- 
kind; Saviour, in that, through the effusion of blood, which i 
becomes our ransom, he delivers us from sin, and from the con- 
sequences inseparable from it, viz. the tyranny of the demon 
and of hell: Saviour, in that, attracting upon his own head the 
chastisement due to our transgressions, he reconciles us with 
God, and opens to us afresh the entry of the eternal sanctuary, 
which sin hath shut against us. But, my brethren, if the Son 
of Mary be but a mere man, of what value, in the eyes of God, 
will be the oblation of his blood ? If Jesus Christ be not God, 
how will his mediation be accepted, while he would himself have 
occasion for a Mediator to reconcile him with God? 

This proof, which I only touch upon here, and so many others 
with which religion furnishes me, would quickly stop the mouth 
of the ungodly, and confound his impiety, if I undertook to 
show them in all their light, and to give an extension in pro- 
portion to their importance. But, God forbid that I should 
come here, into the holy temple where the altars of our divine 
Saviour are raised up, where his worshippers assemble, to en- 
ter into contestation, as if I spake in the presence of his ene- 
mies, or, to make the apology of the mystery of the Man-God, 



486 



THE DIVINITY OF [Serm. XXVIII. 



before a believing people, and a sovereign whose most illustri- 
ous and most cherished title is that of Christian. It is not, 
therefore, to combat these ungodly, that, on this day, I conse- 
crate my discourse to the divinity and to the eternal glory of 
Jesus, Son of the living God; I come for the sole purpose of 
consoling our faith, while recounting the wonders of him who 
is its Author and Perfecter; and to re-animate our piety in ex- 
posing to you the glory and the divinity of our Mediator, who 
is its object and its sweetest hope. 

It is even proper to renew, from time to time, these grand 
truths in the minds of the great and of the princes of the people, 
in order to strengthen them against these discourses of infide- 
lity which they, in general, are only too much in the way of 
hearing; and it is expedient sometimes to raise up the veil 
which covers the sanctuary, that they may have a view of those 
hidden beauties which religion only holds out to their respect 
and their homages. 

Now, the Divinity of the Mediator can only be proven by his 
ministry; his disciples can appear only in his functions: and, in 
order to know whether he be descended from heaven, and equal 
with the most high, it requires only to relate the purposes for 
which he came upon the earth. He came, my brethren, to 
form a holy and a believing people; a believing people, who 
subject their reason to the sacred yoke of faith; a holy people, 
whose conversation is in heaven, and who are no longer respon- 
sible to the flesh, to live according to the flesh: such is the 
grand design of his temporal mission. 

The lustre of his ministry is the firmest foundation of our 
faith: the spirit of his ministry, the sole rule of our morals. 
Now, if he was only a man commissioned of God, the lustre of 
his ministry would be the inevitable occasion of our superstition 
and idolatuy; the spirit of his ministry would be the fatal snare 
to entrap our innocence. Thus, whether we consider the lustre 
or the spirit of his ministry, the glory of his divinity remains 
equally and invincibly established. 

O Jesus, sole Lord of all, accept this public homage of our 
confession and of our faith! While impiety blasphemes in se- 
cret, and under the shades of darkness against thy glory, allow 
us the consolation of publishing it with the voice of all ages in 
the face of these altars; and form, in our heart, not only that 
faith which confesses and worships thee, but also that which 
follows and which imitates thee. 

Part L God can manifest himself to men, only in order to 
teach them what he is, and what men owe to him; and reli- 
gion is, properly speaking, but a divine light, which discovers 
God to man, and which regulates the duties of man towards 
God. Whether the Most High show himself to the earth, or 
whether he fill extraordinary men with his spirit, the end of all 



Serm. XXVIII.] JESUS CHRIST. 



his proceedings can be only the knowledge and the sanctification 
of his name in the universe, and the establishment of a wor- 
ship in which they render to him what is due to him alone. 

Now, if the Lord Jesus, come in the fulness of time, was 
nothing more than an upright and innocent man, only chosen 
to be the messenger of God upon the earth, the principal end 
of his ministry would have been that of rendering the world ido- 
latrous, and of ravishing from the divinity that glory which is 
his due, in order to appropriate it to himself. 

In effect, my brethren, whether we consider the lustre of his 
ministry in that pompous train of oracles and of figurative allu- 
sions which have preceded him in the wonderful circumstances 
which have accompanied him, and, lastly, in the works which 
he hath operated; the lustre of it is such, that, if Jesus Christ 
was only a man similar to us, God, who hath sent him upon 
the earth, arrayed in such glory and power, would himself 
have deceived us, and would be culpable of the idolatry of those 
who worship him. 

The first signal character of the ministry of Jesus Christ is, 
that, from the beginning of the world, it was foretold and pro- 
mised to men. Scarcely had the fall of Adam taken place, 
when the Restorer, whom his guilt had rendered necessary to 
the earth, is shown to him from afar. In the following ages, 
God, it would appear, is only occupied in preparing mankind 
for his coming: if he manifest himself to the patriarchs, it is in 
order to confirm their faith in that expectation; if he inspire 
prophets, it is in order to announce him; if he choose to him- 
self a people, it is for the purpose of making it the depository 
of that grand promise; if he prescribe sacrifices and religious 
ceremonies to men, it is in order to trace out in them, as from 
afar, the history of him who was to come. Whatever took 
place upon the earth seems to lead to that great event: empires 
and kingdoms fall or rise only in order to prepare the way for 
it: the heavens are only opened to promise it: and, as St. Paul 
says, the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain to bring 
forth the Righteous, who is to come for the redemption of our 
body from the bondage of corruption and sin. 

Now, my brethren, to inspire, from the beginning of all ages, 
the earth with the expectation of a man, and to announce him 
to it from heaven, is already, in fact to prepare men to receive 
him with a kind of religion and worship; and, even granting 
that Jesus Christ were to have only the eclat of that particular 
circumstance which distinguishes him from all other men, the su- 
perstition of the people, with regard to him, were he only a simple 
creature, had been to dread. But even the circumstance of 
J esus Christ being foretold is not so wonderful as those in which 
he hath been it, which are more surprising than even the pro- 
phecies themselves. In effect, if Cyrus and John the Baptist 
have been foretold, long before their birth, in the prophecies of 



488 



THE DIVINITY OF [Serm. XXVIII. 



Isaiah and of Malachi, these are only individual prophecies, 
without consequence or train, and which are found in a single 
prophet; predictions which announce only particular events, 
and hy which the religion of the people could never he caught 
or surprised: Cyrus to he the re-establisher of the walls of Jeru- 
salem; John the Baptist to prepare the way for him who was 
to come; both in order to confirm by the accomplishment of 
their particular prophecies, the truth and the divinity of all the 
prophecies, which announce Jesus Christ. 

But here, my brethren, it is a Messenger of Heaven, foretold 
by a whole people, announced, during four thousand years, by 
a long train of prophecies, desired of all nations, figured by all 
the ceremonies, expected by all the just, and shown from afar 
in all ages. The patriarchs expire in wishing to see him; the 
just live in that expectation: fathers instruct their children to 
wish for him; and this desire is like a domestic religion which 
is perpetuated from age to age. The prophets themselves of 
the Gentiles see the Star of Jacob shining from afar; and this 
great event is announced even in the oracles of idols. Here, it 
is not for a particular event; it is to be the resource of the con- 
demned world, the legislator of all people, the light of all nations, 
the salvation of Israel; it is in order to blot out iniquity from 
the earth, to bring an eternal righteousness, to fill the universe 
with the spirit of God, and to be the blessed bearer of an im- 
mortal peace to all men. What a pompous train! What a 
snare for the religion of all ages, if such magnificent prepara- 
tions announce only a simple creature; and, more especially, 
in times when the credulity of the people so easily placed ex- 
traordinary men in the rank of gods ! 

Besides, when John the Baptist appears on the borders of the 
Jordan, afraid, it would seem, that the single oracle which had 
foretold him might become an occasion of idolatory to the people 
whom the fame of his sanctity attracted round him, he performs 
no miracles; he never ceases to say: " I am not he whom you 
expect; but one mightier than me cometh, the latchet of whose 
shoes I am not worthy to unlose;" he is only watchful, it 
would appear, to prevent superstitious honours. Jesus Christ, 
on the contrary, whom four thousand years of expectation, of 
allusions, of prophecies, of promises, had with so much magnifi- 
cence, announced to the earth; Jesus Christ, far from prevent- 
ing the superstition of the people with regard to himself, comes 
in full authority and might; he does miracles and deeds which 
no one had ever done before him; arid, not only does he raise 
himself above John the Baptist, but he gives out that he is equal 
with God himself. Had the error been to dread, and, if to ren- 
der to him divine honours had been idolatry, where would be 
his zeal for the glory of him who sends him, or where would be 
his love for men? 

And yet more, my brethren: all the extraordinary men of 



Serm. XXVIIL] JESUS CHRIST. 



489 



which the preceding ages could boast, all the just of the law and 
of the age of the patriarchs, had been only the imperfect types of 
the Christ; and again, each of them represented only some in- 
dividual trait of his life and ministry; Melchizedek, his priest- 
hood; Abraham, his quality of Head and Father of believers; 
Isaac, his sacrifice; Job, his persecutions and sufferings; Mo- 
ses, his office of Mediator; Joshua, his triumphant entry into 
the land of the living with a chosen people. All these men, 
however, so venerable and so miraculous, were only rude sketches 
of the Messiah to come; and how great must that Messiah him- 
self have been to be, seeing his figures were so illustrious and 
so shining ! But, deprive Jesus Christ of his divinity and of 
his eternal origin, and the reality has nothing superior to the 
figure. I know, as we shall afterwards say, that, when we nar- 
rowly examine the lustre of his wonders, we shall see them mark- 
ed with divine characters which are only to be found in the life 
of those great men. But, to judge of them by the eyes of the 
senses alone, the parallel would not be favourable to Jesus 
Christ. Is he greater than Abraham? That man so great, that 
the Lord himself, among his most pompous names, had taken 
that of the God of Abraham, as if in order to proclaim to the 
world thtat the homages of a man, so righteous and so extraor- 
dinary, were more glorious to his sovereignty than the title of 
God of empires and of nations : so great, that the Jews believed 
themselves superior to all other nations of the earth, only be- 
cause they were the posterity of that famous chief so cherished 
of Heaven ; and that fathers, in recounting to their children the 
wonders of their nation, and the history of their ancestors, ani- 
mated them to virtue, only by putting them in remembrance 
that they were the children of Abraham and the members of a 
holy race? Is he more wonderful than Moses? That man, 
mighty in words and in deeds, mediator of a holy covenant, 
who broke the yoke of Egypt, and delivered his people from 
bondage: that man, who was established the god of Pharaoh, 
who seemed the master of nature, who covered the earth with 
plagues, who divided seas, who made a new nourishment to be 
showered from heaven; that man, who saw the Lord face to 
face upon the holy mountain, and who appeared before Israel 
all resplendent in light? What is there more astonishing or more 
magnificent in the life of Jesus Christ? Nevertheless, these 
were only rude sketches of his glory and might: he was to be 
the last finishing and perfection of them. Now, if Jesus Christ 
were not the image of the substance of his Father, and the eter- 
nal splendour of his glory, he, at the utmost, could only be 
equalled with these first men; and the incredulity of the Jews 
might, without blasphemy, demand of him: "Art thou great- 
er than our father, Abraham, or than the prophets which are 
dead: whom makest thou thyself?" I have then justly said, 
that if, in the first place, you will estimate his ministry from 



490 



THE DIVINITY OF [Serm. XXVIII. 



that pompous train of oracles and of figures which have an- 
nounced him, the splendour is such, that, if Jesus Christ he 
but a man similar to us, the wisdom itself of God would be cul- 
pable of the mistake of those who worship him. 

But, my brethren, the Christ hath been foretold with his 
members: we are comprised in the prophecies which have an- 
nounced him to the earth: we have been promised as a holy 
race, a spiritual people, who were to bear the law engraven on 
their heart, who were to sigh only after eternal riches, and who 
were to adore in spirit and in truth: like Jesus Christ, we have 
composed the expectation of the just of ancient times, and the 
desire of nations: we are that new Jerusalem, pure and unde- 
nted, so often announced in the prophets, where God alone was 
to be known and worshipped; where faith was to be the sole 
light to illuminate us; charity the only bond of union; and the 
land of promise the only hope to animate us. Now, do we an- 
swer an expectation so illustrious and so holy? Are we worthy 
of having been the earnest desire of all those distant ages which 
have preceded us? Do we merit to have been looked forward to 
like celestial men, who were to fill the earth with sanctity and 
righteousness? Have not those ages been deceived in their ex- 
pectation of the Christian people? Were the just of those dis- 
tant times to return upon the earth, could we present ourselves 
to them, and say: Behold t-hose celestial, spiritual, temperate, 
believing, and charitable men, whom you expected? Alas! my 
brethren, the just of former times were Christians before the 
birth of faith; and we are still Jews, under all the advantages 
of the gospel: we live solely for the earth: we know no true 
riches but the present good: our whole religion is grounded in 
the senses: we have received more assistances, but we are not 
more believing. 

To the lustre of the prophecies which have announced Jesus 
Christ, we must add that of his works and of his miracles : se- 
cond resplendent character of his ministry. Yes, my brethren, 
even admitting that Heaven had not promised him to the earth 
with such magnificence; that the manner in which he was to 
appear to the earth had not constituted, during all these first 
ages, the sole occupation and expectation of the universe; did 
ever man appear more wonderful, more divine in his actions, 
and in all the circumstances of his life? 

I say, 1st, in his actions and in his miracles. I know, and 
we come from saying it, that, in the ages which preceded him, 
extraordinary men had appeared upon the earth, to whom the 
Lord seemed to have delegated his omnipotence and virtue: in 
Egypt and in the desert Moses appeared the master of heaven 
and earth; in the following ages Elijah came to present the 
same sight to men. But, when we narrowly examine their 
power itself, we find that all these miraculous men always bore 
with them the marks of weakness and dependence. 



Serm. XXVIIL] JESUS CHRIST. 



491 



Moses only operated his miracles with his mysterious rod; 
without it he was no longer hut* a weak and powerless man; 
and it would seem that the Lord had attached the virtue of 
«miracles to that morsel of parched wood for the purpose of 
making the Israelites sensihle that, in his hands, Moses him- 
self was hut a weak and fragile instrument, whom he was pleas- 
ed to employ in the operation of grand effects. Jesus Christ 
operates the grandest miracles, even without speaking; and the 
sole touch of his garment cures inveterate infirmities. Moses 
communicates not to his disciples the power of operating mi- 
racles; for it was an extraneous gift which he had received from 
Heaven, and which he had not the power of delegating: Jesus 
Christ leaves to his disciples a still greater efficacy than had ap- 
peared even in himself. Moses always acts in the name of the 
Lord: Jesus Christ operates all in his own name; and the works 
of his Father are his. Nevertheless, this Moses, who had not 
been prophesied of like Jesus Christ, who remitted not sins as 
he did, who never gave himself out as equal to God, but only 
as his faithful servant, — this Moses, dreading that, after his 
death, his miracles should make him pass for a god, takes pre- 
cautions lest, in the revolution of ages, the credulity of his peo- 
ple render to him divine honours : he goes up alone to the moun- 
tain, to expire far from the sight of his brethren, in the fear of 
their coming to offer up victims upon his tomb, and for ever re- 
moves his body from the superstition of the tribes; he does not 
show himself to his disciples after his death: he contents him- 
self with leaving to them the law of God, and employs every 
mean to obliterate himself from their remembrance. And Jesus 
Christ, after all the miracles which he operates in Judea, after 
all the prophecies which had announced him, after having ap- 
peared as a God upon the earth, his tomb is known to all the 
universe, exposed to the veneration of all people and ages; even 
after his death he shows himself to his disciples. Was supersti- 
tion, then, less to be dreaded here? Or is Jesus Christ less 
zealous than Moses for the glory of the Supreme Being and for 
the salvation of men? 

Elijah, it is true, raises up the dead; but he is obliged to 
stretch himself out upon the body of the child whom he recalls 
to life; and it is easily seen that he invokes a foreign power; 
that he withdraws from the empire of death a soul which is not 
subjugated to him; and that he is not himself the master of life 
and death. Jesus Christ raises up the dead as easily as he per- 
forms the most common actions; he speaks as 'master of those 
who repose in an eternal sleep; and it is thoroughly felt that 
he is the God of the dead as of the living, never more tranquil 
and calm than when he is operating the grandest things. 

Lastly, The poets represented to us their sybils and their 
priestesses as mad women, while foretelling the future : it would 
seem that they were unable to sustain the presence of the false 



492 



THE DIVINITY OF [Serm. XXVIII. 



spirit which dwelt within them. Even our own prophets, when 
announcing future things, without losing the use of their rea- 
son, or departing from the solemnity and the decency of their 
ministry, partook of a divine enthusiasm : the soft sounds of the 
lyre were often necessary to arouse in them the prophetic spirit; 
it was easily to be seen that they were animated by a foreign 
impulse: and that it was not from their own funds they drew 
the knowledge of the future, and those hidden mysteries which 
they announced to men. Jesus Christ prophecies as he speaks; 
the knowledge of the future has nothing either to move, disquiet, 
or surprise him, because all times are contained in his mind; 
the future mysteries which he announces are not sudden and in- 
fused lights to his soul; they are familiar objects to him, always 
present to his view, and the images of which he finds within 
himself; and all ages to come, under the immensity of his re- 
gards, are as the present day which illuminates us. Thus, 
neither the resurrection of the dead, nor the foretelling of the 
future, ever injures his natural tranquillity; he sports himself, 
if I may venture to say so, in operating miracles in the universe; 
and if he, at times, appear to tremble and to be troubled, it is 
solely when viewing the sin and the perversity of his people; 
because the more exalted one is in sanctity, the more does sin 
offer new horrors: and that the only thing which a Man-God 
can view with trembling, is the spectacle of a conscience stain- 
ed with crimes. 

Such is the omnipotency of Jesus Christ: his miracles bear 
no mark of dependence : and, not satisfied with thereby showing 
to us that he is equal to God, he also advertises us, that, what- 
ever wonder is operated by his Father upon the earth, he like- 
wise operates; and that his Father's works are his. Hath any 
prophet, down to the period of Jesus Christ, spoken in this 
manner; and who, far from rendering glory to God as the 
author of every excellent gift, hath attributed to himself all the 
grand things which it had pleased the Lord to operate through 
his ministry? 

But, my brethren, if we have also been prophesied with Jesus 
Christ, we are moreover participators of his sovereignty over 
all creatures. Through faith the Christian is master of nature: 
all is subjected to him, because he himself is inferior only to 
God; all his actions ought to be miraculous, because they ought 
all to proceed from a sublime and a divine principle, and far 
above the powers of human weakness: we ought to be, as I may 
say, miraculous men, masters of the world, in contemning it; 
exalted above the laws of nature, by overcoming them; sovereign 
disposers of events, by a thorough and tranquil submission to 
them; more powerful than death itself, by wishing for it. Such 
is the sublimity of the Christian: and, how great must Jesus 
Christ have been to have exalted human weakness to such a pin- 
nacle of grandeur and might! 

Finally, The last splendid character of his ministry is the 



Serm. XXVIIL] JESUS CHRIST. 



493 



marvellous, and, till then, unheard-of circumstances which com- 
pose the whole course of his mortal life. I know that he came 
in nakedness and humiliation; but, through these obscure and 
contemptible externals, what lustre are not even the enemies of 
his divinity forced to acknowledge there? 

In the first place, although they consider him as a man similar 
to us, they, nevertheless, believe him to have been formed, 
through the invisible operation of the Most High, in the womb 
of a virgin of Judah, in opposition to the common law of the 
children of Adam. What glory already for a simple creature ! 

Secondly^ Scarcely is he born, when celestial legions sing the 
praises of the Lord, and give us to understand, that this birth 
renders his glory to the most High, and brings an eternal peace 
upon the earth. What then is this creature who can Tender 
glory to the most High, whose glory is in himself alone? Im- 
mediately after this a new star calls the wise men from the 
heart of the East; and, guided by that miraculous light, those 
righteous men come from the extremities of the earth to worship 
the new King of the Jews. 

Trace all the circumstances of his life. If Mary bring him to 
the temple, a righteous man and a holy woman proclaim his 
future greatness; and, transported with a holy joy, they die 
with pleasure, after having seen him whom they call the salva- 
tion of the world, the light of nations, and the glory of Israel. 
The doctors, assembled in the temple, behold, with terror, his 
infancy to be wiser and more enlightened than all the wisdom 
of old men. In proportion as he grows up, his glory unfolds 
itself: John the Baptist, that man, the greatest of the children 
of men, humbles himself before him, and says that he is not 
worthy of performing the meanest offices to him. A voice from 
Heaven declares that he is the well-beloved Son. The affright- 
ed demons fly from before him, are unable to support the sole 
presence of his sanctity, and confess that he is the holy of God. 
Collect together testimonies so different and so new, circum- 
stances so unheard-of and so extraordinary; what is this man 
who appears upon the earth with so much eclat? And are not 
the people who have worshipped him at least excusable? 

But these are only weak preludes of his glory. If he private- 
ly withdraw himself upon the Tabor, accompanied with three 
disciples, his glory, impatient, if I dare to say it, at having 
hitherto been held captive under the veil of humanity, openly 
bursts forth: he appears all resplendent in light: the heavenly 
Father, who theu, it would appear, lest the glory of Jesus Christ 
should become an occasion of error and idolatry to the astonish- 
ed disciples, spectators of this sight, ought to have warned them 
that this Jesus, whom they beheld so glorious, was nevertheless 
only his servant and messenger, declares to them, on the con- 
trary, that this is his well-beloved Son, in whom he is well pleas- 
ed, and affixes no bounds to the homages which, according to his 



494 



THE DIVINITY OF [Serai. XXVIII, 



pleasure, they are to render to him. When Moses appeared 
surrounded with glory, and, as it were, transfigured on Mount 
Sinai, afraid lest the Israelites, always superstitious, should con- 
sider him as a god descended upon the earth, the Lord, amid a 
flame of fire, declared at the same time from on high, " I am 
that I am, and thou shalt worship only me." Moses himself 
appears before the people with only the tables of the law in his 
hands, as if to let them know that, notwithstanding the glcry 
with which they had seen him arrayed, he nevertheless was only 
the minister, and not the author, of the holy law; that he could 
offer it to them only engraven on stone, and that it belonged 
solely to God to engrave it on hearts. But, on the Tabor, Jesus 
Christ appears as the legislator himself: the new law is not 
given to him by his Father to bear it to men; he only com- 
mandeth them to listen to him, and from his own mouth he pro- 
poseth him as their legislator, or rather as their living and eternal 
law. 

What more shall I say, my brethren? If from the Tabor we 
pass to Mount Calvary, that place, in which all the ignominy of 
the Son of Man was to be consummated, is not less, however, 
the theatre of his glory and divinity. All nature, disorganized, 
confesses its Author in him; the stars which are hidden; the 
dead who arise; the stones of the tombs, which open of their 
own accord, and break in pieces; the veil of the temple, which 
is rent from top to bottom: even incredulity itself, which con- 
fesses him through the mouth of the centurion; all feel that it is 
not an ordinary man who dies, and that things take place upon 
that mount totally new and extraordinary. 

Many righteous before him had died for the truth, by the 
hands of the impious: the head of the fore-runner had lately 
been seen in the palace of Herod, as the price of voluptuousness: 
Isaiah, by a grievous death, had rendered glory to God; and not- 
withstanding his royal blood, his august birth was ineffectual in 
sheltering him from those persecutions which are always the re- 
compense of truth and zeal: many others had died for the sake 
of righteousness; but nature seemed not wholly interested in their 
sufferings; the dead forsook not their tombs, to come, and, as it 
were, reproach to the living their sacrilege; nothing, in any de- 
gree similar, had, as yet, appeared upon the earth. 

Survey the rest of his mysteries; everywhere you will find 
traits which distinguish him from all other men. If he rise up 
from among the dead, besides that it is through his own effici- 
ency, (which no eye had ever yet beheld), it is not, like so many 
others, who had been raised up through the ministry of the 
prophets, to return once more into the empire of death: he ari- 
ses, never more to die; and, even here below, he receives an 
immortal life, which is what had never yet been accorded to any 
creature. 

If he is carried up to heaven, it is not in a flaming chariot 



Serm. XXVIIL] JESUS CHRIST, 



495 



that he vanishes in the twinkling of an eye; he ascends with 
majesty, and allows all leisure to his affectionate disciples to 
worship him, and to accompany their divine Master with their 
eyes and their homages. The angels, as if to receive him into hia 
empire, come to greet this King of glory and comfort the afflic- 
tion of the disciples, by promising him once more to the earth, 
surrounded with glory and immortality. All here announces 
the God of heaven, who returns to the place from whence he 
came, and who goes to resume the possession of his own glory; 
at least, every thing inclines men to believe so. 

And, in truth, my brethren, when Elijah is taken up to 
heaven in a fiery chariot, a single disciple is the only spectator 
of that miraculous ascension; it takes place in a retired spot, 
removed from the view of the other children of the prophets, 
who, perhaps more credulous and less enlightened than Eliseus, 
might have been inclined to render divine honours to that mira- 
culous man. But Jesus Christ, surrounded with glory, mounts 
up to heaven before the eyes of five hundred disciples: the 
weakest, and those who were least confirmed in the faith of his 
resurrection, are the first who are invited to the holy mountain : 
nothing is dreaded from their credulity : on the contrary, their 
adorations are equally permitted as their regrets and tears; and 
a life full of prodigies, till then so unheard-of on the earth, is 
at last terminated by a circumstance still more wonderful, and 
sufficient of itself to make him to be regarded as a God, and to 
immortalize error and idolatry among men. 

In effect, if the pagan ages, in order to justify the ridiculous 
and impious homages which they paid to their legislators, to 
the founders of empires, and to other celebrated men, gave it 
out, in their historians and poets, that these heroes were not 
dead, but had only disappeared from the earth; and that, being 
of the same nature with the gods, they had ascended to heaven, 
in order to assume their station among the other stars, which, 
according to them, were so many divinities who enlighten us, 
and for the purpose of there enjoying that immortality to which 
their divine birth entitled them: if so very vulgar a fiction had 
of itself been able to render men so long idolatrous, what im- 
pression must the reality of that fable not have made upon the 
people? And if the universe had worshipped impostors, who 
were falsely said to have mounted up to heaven, would it not 
have been excusable to worship a miraculous man, whom men, 
with their own eyes, had seen exalted above the stars? 

But observe, my brethren, that the occasion of error finishes 
not with Jesus Christ; it is announced to us that, at the end of 
ages, he will again appear in the heavens surrounded with power 
and majesty, and accompanied with all the heavenly host: all 
assembled nations shall, with trembling, await at his feet the 
decision of their eternal destiny: he will sovereignly pronounce 
their decisive sentence. The Abrahams, the Moseses, the Davids, 



496 



THE DIVINITY OF [Serm. XXVIII. 



the Elijahs, the John the Baptists, and all that ages have pro- 
duced of great and most wonderful, shall be submitted to his 
judgment and to his empire; he will himself be exalted above 
all power, all dominion, and all which is termed great in heaven 
and in the earth : he will erect his throne above the clouds, and 
sit on the right hand of the Most High: he will appear Master, 
not only of life and death, but the immortal King of ages, the 
Prince of eternity, the Chief of a holy people, the supreme Ar- 
biter of all the created. What then is this man to whom the 
Lord hath delegated such power? And the dead themselves, 
who shall appear in judgment before him, shall they be con- 
demned for having worshipped him, when they shall see him 
clothed with such glory, majesty, and power? 

And one reflection, which I beg you to make in finishing this 
part of my discourse, is, that, if only one extraordinary and 
divine trait were to be found here in the course of a long life, 
we might be inclined to believe that it sometimes pleaseth the 
Lord to allow his glory and his power to shine forth in his ser- 
vants. Thus Enoch was carried up, Moses appeared transfi- 
gured on the holy mountain, Elijah was raised up to heaven in 
a fiery chariot, John the Baptist was foretold. But, besides 
that these were individual circumstances, and that the language 
of those miraculous men and of their disciples, with respect to 
the divinity and to themselves, left no room for superstition and 
mistake; here, it is an assemblage of wonders, which all, or 
even taken separately, would have been sufficient to deceive the 
credulity of men: here, all the different traits, dispersed among 
all these extraordinary men, who had been considered almost as 
gods upon the earth, are collected together in Jesus Christ, but 
in a manner a thousand times more glorious and more divine. 
He prophesies, but more loftily, and with more striking cha- 
racters, than John the Baptist: he appears transfigured in the 
holy mount, but surrounded with more glory than Moses: he 
ascends to heaven, but with more marks of power and majesty 
than Elijah: he penetrates into the future, but with more accu- 
racy and clearness than all the prophets : he is produced, not only 
from a barren womb, like Samuel, but likewise by a pure and in- 
nocent virgin: what shall I say? And not only he does not unde- 
ceive men by certain and precise expressions upon his origin as 
purely human; but his sole language, with respect to his equality 
to the most High; but the sole doctrine of his disciples, who tell 
us that he was in the bosom of God from all eternity, and that all 
hath been made through him, who call him their Lord and their 
God, who inform us that he is all in all things, would justify 
the error of those who worship him, had even his life been, in 
other respects, an ordinary one, and similar to that of other 
men. 

O you ! who refuse to him his glory and his divinity, yet, 
nevertheless, consider him as a messenger sent by God to in- 



Serm. XXVIIL] JESUS CHRIST. 



497 



struct men, complete the blasphemy? and confound him with 
those impostors who have come to seduce the world, since, far 
from tending to establish the glory of God and the knowledge 
of his name, the splendour of his ministry has answered the sole 
purpose of erecting himself into a divinity, of placing him at 
the side of the Most High, and of plunging the whole universe 
into the most dangerous, the most durable, the most inevitable, 
and the most universal of all idolatries. 

For our part, my brethren, we who believe in him, and to 
whom the mystery of the Christ hath been revealed, let us ne- 
ver lose sight of that divine model which the Father shows to 
us from on high on the holy mount. Let us enter into the spi- 
rit of the diverse mysteries of which his whole mortal life is com- 
posed; they are merely the different states of the life of the 
Christian on this earth; let us confess the new empire which 
Jesus Christ came to form in our hearts. The world, which 
we have hitherto served, hath never been able to deliver us 
from our grievances and wretchedness. We vainly sought in 
it, freedom, peace, and comfort of life; and we have found 
only slavery, disquiet, bitterness, and the curse of life. Be- 
hold a new Redeemer, who comes to bring peace to the earth; 
but it is not as the world promises it that he gives it to us. 
The world had wished to conduct us to peace and happiness 
through the pleasures of the senses, indolence, and a vain phi- 
losophy: it hath not been successful: by favouring our pas- 
sions it hath only augmented our punishments. Jesus Christ 
comes to propose a new way for the attainment of that peace 
and happiness which we search after: detachment from, and 
contempt of the world, mortification of the senses, self-denial; 
behold the new riches which he comes to display to men. Let 
us be undeceived: we have no happiness to expect, even in this 
life, but by repressing our passions, and by refusing ourselves 
the gratification of every pleasure which disquiets and corrupts 
the heart: there is no philosophy, but that of the gospel, which 
can bestow happiness, or make real sages, because it alone re- 
gulates the mind, fixes the heart, and by restoring man to God, 
restores him to himself. All those who have pursued other 
ways, have found only vanity and vexation of spirit; and Jesus 
Christ alone, in bringing the sword and separation, is come to 
bring peace among men. 

O my God ! I know only too well that the world and its plea- 
sures make none happy! come then and resume thy influence 
over a heart which in vain endeavours to fly from thee: and 
which its own disgusts recal to thee in spite of itself: come to 
be its Redeemer, its peace, and its light, and pay more regard 
to its wretchedness than to its crimes. 

Behold how the lustre of the ministry of Jesus Christ would 
operate as an inevitable occasion of idolatry in men, were he 



49S 



THE DIVINITY OF [Serm. XXVIII. 



only a simple creature. Let us now see how the spirit of his 
ministry would become the snare of our innocence. 

Part II. The lustre of the ministry of Jesus Christ is not 
the most august and most magnificent side of it. However dig- 
nified he hath appeared, in consequence of all the oracles which 
have announced him, the works which he hath operated, and 
the shining circumstances of his mysteries, these are merely the 
outward appearances, as I may say, of his glory and of his 
grandeur; and, in order to know all that he is, we must enter 
into the principle and spirit of his ministry. Now, in the spi- 
rit of his ministry are comprised his doctrine, his favours, and 
his promises. Let us display these in their proper extent, and 
prove, either that we must deny to Jesus Christ his quality of 
a righteous man, and of a messenger of the almighty God, 
which the enemies of his divinity grant him to have been, or we 
must admit that he is himself a God manifested in the flesh, and 
come down upon the earth in order to save mankind. 

Yes, my brethren, this is an inevitable alternative : if Jesus 
Christ be holy, he is God; and, if his ministry be not a mini- 
stry of deceit and imposition, it is the ministry of eternal Truth 
itself, which hath been manifested for our instruction. Now, 
the enemies of his divine birth are forced to admit, that he hath 
been a man righteous, innocent, and a friend of God; and if the 
world hath beheld dark and impious minds, who have likewise 
dared to blaspheme against his innocence, and to confound him 
with seducers, these have been only some individual monsters 
who were held in abhorrence by the human race, and whose 
names, too odious to all nature, are for ever buried in the 
same darkness from which the horror of their impiety originally 
came. 

In effect, what man, till then, had appeared upon the earth 
with more incontestable marks of innocence and sanctity than 
Jesus, Son of the living God? In what philosopher had ever 
been observed such a love of virtue, so sincere a contempt of 
the world, so much charity towards men, such indifference for 
human glory, such zeal for the glory of the Supreme Being, 
such elevation above whatever is admired or sought after by 
men? How great is his zeal for the salvation of men! It is to 
that object that he directs all his discourses, all his cares, all 
his desires, and all his anxieties. The philosophers criticised 
only the men, and solely endeavoured to expose their weakness 
or their absurdities: Jesus Christ never speaks of their vices 
but in order to point out their remedies. The former were the 
censurers of human weaknesses; Jesus Christ is their physician: 
the former gloried in being able to point out vices in others, 
from which they themselves were not exempted; he never 
speaks, but with the bitterest sorrow, of faults, from which his 



Serm. XXVIIL] JESUS CHRIST. 



499 



own innocence protects him, and even sheds tears over the dis- 
orders of an unbelieving city: it is easily seen that the former 
had no intention to reclaim men, but merely to attract esteem 
to themselves, by pretending to contemn them; and that the 
only wish of the latter is to save them, and that he is little af- 
fected with their applauses or esteem. 

Pursue the whole detail of his manners and of his conduct, 
and see if any righteous character hath ever appeared on the 
earth, more generally exempted from all the most inseparable 
weaknesses of humanity. The more narrowly he is examined, 
the more is his sanctity displayed. His disciples, who have it 
best in their power to know him, are the most affected with 
the innocence of his life; and familiarity, so dangerous to the 
most heroical virtue, serves only in his to discover fresh matter 
of wonder. He speaks only the language of Heaven; he never 
replies but when his answers may be useful towards the salva- 
tion of those who interrogate him. We see not in him those 
intervals, as I may say, in which the man reappears; on every 
occasion he is the messenger of the most high. The common- 
est actions are extraordinary in him, through the novelty and 
the sublimity of the dispositions with which he accompanies 
them; and, when he eats with the pharisee, he does not appear 
a man less divine than when he raises up Lazarus. Surely, my 
brethren, nature alone could never lead human weakness so far; 
this is not a philosopher who enjoins to others what he doth not 
himself, it is a righteous character, who, in his own examples, 
adopts the rules and precepts of his doctrine; and holy must he 
indeed be, seeing the very disciple who betrayed him, so inte- 
rested to justify his own perfidy by an exposure of his faults, 
renders public testimony, however, to his innocence and sanc- 
tity; and that the whole challenged malice of his enemies hath 
never been able to convict him of sin. 

Now, I say, that if Jesus Christ be holy, he is God; and 
that, whether you should consider the doctrine which he hath 
taught us with respect to his Father or with respect to men, it 
is no longer but a mass of equivocations, or qualified blasphe- 
mies, if he be only an ordinary man, merely deputed by God 
for the instruction of men. 

I say, whether you should consider it with respect to his Fa- 
ther. In effect, if Jesus Christ be but a simple messenger of 
the Most High, he comes, then, for the sole purpose of mani- 
festing to idolatrous nations the unity of the divine essence. 
But, besides, that his mission principally regards the Jews, 
who, for a long time past, had not returned to idolatry, and, con- 
sequently, needed not that God should raise up a prophet to 
reclaim them from an error of which they were not guilty, and 
a prophet whom they were taught from the beginning of the 
world to expect as the light of Israel and the Redeemer of his 
people; and, besides, in what manner doth Jesus Christ fulfil 



500 



THE DIVINITY OF [Serm. XXVIII. 



his ministry, and what is his language with regard to the Su- 
preme Being? Moses and the prophets, charged with the same 
mission, never ceased to proclaim that the Lord was one and 
the same; that it was impious to compare him to the similitude 
of the creature; and that they themselves were only his servants 
and messengers, vile instruments in the hands of a God, who, 
through them, operated great things. No dubious expression 
escapes from their mouth on so essential a point of their mission; 
no comparison of themselves to the Supreme Being, always 
dangerous, in consequence of the natural tendency of man to 
prostitute his homages to men, and to raise up for himself pal- 
pable and visible gods; no equivocal term which might have 
blended themselves with the Lord, in whose name they spake, 
and have given birth to a superstition and an idolatry, to com- 
bat which they only came. 

But if Jesus Christ be only a messenger such as they were, 
with how much less fidelity doth he fulfil his ministry ! He 
continually says that he is equal to his Father; he acquaints us, 
that he hath come down from heaven, and that he hath quitted 
the bosom of God; that he was before Abraham; that he was 
before all things; that the Father and he are one; that eternal 
life consists in the knowledge of the Son, as well as in the know- 
ledge of the Father; that whatever is done by the Father, the 
Son also doth. Had any prophet, down to Jesus Christ, spo- 
ken in a language so new, so strange, so disrespectful towards 
the supreme God; and who, far from rendering glory to God 
as the author of every good gift, hath attributed to his own ef- 
ficiency the great things which the Lord hath deigned to ope- 
rate through his ministiy. Everywhere he compares himself 
to the sovereign God; on one occasion, indeed, he says that 
the Father is greater than he; but what language is that, if he 
be not himself a God manifested in flesh? And would we not 
consider as a fool any man who should seriously tell us that the 
Supreme Being is greater than he? Even to dare to compare 
himself with the divinity, is it not equalling himself to him? Is 
there any proportion either of greater or less betwixt God and 
man, betwixt the whole and nothing? But what do I say? Je- 
sus Christ is not content with saying that he is equal with God; 
he even justifies the novelty of these expressions against the 
murmurings of the Jews who are offended at them: far from 
clearly undeceiving them, he confirms them in the offence; on 
every occasion he affects a language, which, unless cleared up 
and justified by his equality to his Father, becomes either fool- 
ish or impious. If he be not God, what came^he to do upon 
the earth? He comes to offend the Jews, by giving them room 
to believe that he compares himself to the Most High: he 
comes to seduce nations, by procuring to himself the adoration 
of the whole earth after his death: he comes to spread afresh 
obscurity over the universe, and not, as he hath vaunted, to 



Serm. XXVIIL] JESUS CHRIST. 



501 



spread understanding, light, and the knowledge of God. What ! 
my brethren, Paul and Barnabas rend their garments when they 
are taken for gods; they loudly proclaim to the people who 
wished to offer up victims to them, — Worship the Lord alone, 
whose servants and ministers we are. The angel in the Reve- 
lation, when St. John prostrates himself to worship him, rejects 
the homage with horror, and says to him: " Worship God 
alone; I am only thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren that 
have the testimony of Jesus." And Jesus Christ tranquilly 
suffers that they render divine honours to him! And Jesus 
Christ praises the faith of the disciples who worship him, and 
who, with Thomas, call him their Lord and their God! And 
Jesus Christ even confutes his enemies who contest his divinity 
and divine origin ! Is he then less zealous than his disciples for 
the glory of him who sends him? Or is it a matter of less im- 
portance to him, pointedly to undeceive the people on a mistake 
so injurious to the Supreme Being, and which, in fact, destroys 
the whole fruit of his ministry? 

Yes, my brethren, what blessing hath the coming of Jesus 
Christ brought to the world, if those who worship him be ido- 
latrous and profane? All who have believed in him have wor- 
shipped him as the eternal Son of the Father, the image of his 
substance, and the splendour of his glory. There is but a small 
number of men in Christianity, who, though they acknowledge 
him as a messenger of God, yet refuse to him divine honours : 
even this sect universally banished, and execrable even in those 
places where every error finds an asylum, is reduced to a few 
obscure and concealed followers; everywhere punished as an 
impiety from the instant that it dares to avow itself; and forced 
to hide itself in obscurity, and in the extremities of the most 
distant provinces and kingdoms. Is it, then, that numerous 
people of every tongue, of every tribe, and of every nation, 
which Jesus Christ came to form upon the earth? Is it a Jeru- 
salem, formerly barren, and become fruitful, which was to con- 
tain tribes and nations in its bosom, and where the most distant 
isles, princes, and kings, were to come to worship? Are these 
the grand advantages which the world was to reap from the mi- 
nistry of Jesus Christ? Is this, then, that abundance of grace, 
that plenitude of the Spirit of God shed over all men, that uni- 
versal regeneration, that spiritual and lasting reign which the 
prophets had foretold with such majesty, and which was to at- 
tend the coming of the Redeemer? What! my brethren, an 
expectation so magnificent is then reduced to the miserable sight 
of the world plunged into a new idolatry? That event, so bless- 
ed for the earth, promised for so many ages, announced with 
so much pomp, so earnestly longed for by all the righteous, and 
held out from afar to the whole universe as its only resource, 
was then to corrupt and to pervert it for ever? That church, so 
fruitful, of which kings and Caesars, at the head of their people, 



502 



THE DIVINITY OF [Serm. XXVIII. 



were to be the children, was then to contain, in its bosom, only 
a small number of men, equally odious to heaven and to the 
earth, the disgrace of nature and of religion, and obliged to 
seek, in obscurity, a shelter for the horror of their blasphemy? 
And all the future magnificence of the gospel was then to be 
limited to the formation of the detestable sect of an impious 
Socinus? 

O God ! how wise and reasonable doth the faith of thy church 
appear, when opposed to the absurd contradictions of unbelief! 
And how consoling for those who believe in Jesus Christ, and 
who place their hope in him, to behold the abysses which pride 
digs for itself when it pretends to open new ways, and to sap 
the only foundation of the faith and of the hope of Christians. 

Behold, my brethren, how the doctrine of Jesus Christ, with 
relation to his Father, establishes the glory of his eternal ori- 
gin. Thus, when the prophets speak of the God of heaven and 
of the earth, their expressions are too weak for the magificence 
and the grandeur of their ideas. Full of the immensity, the 
omnipotence, and the majesty of the Supreme Being, they ex- 
haust the weakness of the human language, in order, if pos- 
sible, to correspond with the sublimity of these images. That 
God is he who measures the waters of the ocean in the hollow 
of his hand, who weighs the mountains in his balance, in whose 
hands are the thunders and the tempests, who speaks, and all 
is done; who faints not, neither is weary, in upholding the uni- 
verse. It was natural for simple men to speak in this manner of 
the glory of the Most High; the infinite disproportion betwixt the 
immensity of the Supreme Being and the weakness of the human 
mind must strike, dazzle, and confound it; and the most pomp- 
ous expressions are too feeble to convey its astonishment and 
admiration. 

But, when Jesus Christ speaks of the glory of the Lord, it 
is no longer in the pompous style of the prophets; he calls him 
a holy Father, a righteous Father, a merciful Father, a Shep- 
herd who pursues a strayed sheep, and kindly bears it home him- 
self; a Friend who yields to the importunities of his friend; a 
Father feelingly affected with the return and the amendment of 
his son: it is clearly seen that this is a Child who speaks a do- 
mestic language; that the familiarity and the simplicity of his 
expressions suppose in him a sublimity of knowledge which ren- 
ders the idea of the Supreme Being familiar to him, and pre- 
vents him from being struck and dazzled, as we are, with his 
majesty and glory; and, lastly, that he only speaks of what is 
laid open to his view, and which he possesses himself. A per- 
son is much less struck with the eclat of titles which he has 
borne, as I may say, from his birth: the children of kings 
speak, without emotion, of sceptres and crowns; and it is like- 
wise the eternal Son alone of the living God who can speak so 
familiarly of the glory of God himself. 



Serm. XXVIIL] JESUS CHRIST. 



503 



Behold, my brethren, seeing we participate with Jesus Christ 
in all his blessings, the right which he hath acquired for us, of 
considering God as our Father, of daring to call ourselves his chil- 
dren, and of loving rather than of fearing him. Nevertheless, we 
serve him like slaves and hirelings: we dread his chastisements; 
but we are little affected by his love and his promises: his law, 
so righteous, so holy, has nothing pleasing for us; it is a yoke 
which oppresses us, which excites our murmurs, and which we 
would soon free ourselves from were our transgressions against 
it to go unpunished: nothing is heard but complaints against 
the severity of its precepts, but contentions in order to support 
the propriety of those softenings which the world always min- 
gles with their practice: in a word, were he not an avenging 
God we would never confess him; and it is to his justice and to 
his chastisements alone that he is indebted for our respect and 
homages. 

But the doctrine of Jesus Christ, with relation to men whom 
he came to instruct, doth not less establish the truth of his di- 
vine birth. For I speak not here of the wisdom, the sanctity, 
and the sublimity of that doctrine : in it every thing is worthy 
of reason, and of the soundest philosophy: every thing is pro- 
portioned to the wretchedness and to the excellency of man, to 
his wants and to his exalted lot; every thing there inspires con- 
tempt for perishable things, and the love of eternal riches : every 
thing there maintains good order, and the peace and tranquillity 
of states: every thing there is grand, because every thing is true: 
the glory of the deeds is more real and more shining in the 
heart than the deeds themselves. The wise man of the gospel 
seeks, from his virtue here below, only the satisfaction of obey- 
ing God, who will one day amply recompense him for it; and 
he prefers the testimony of his own conscience to all the applau- 
ses of men: he is greater than the entire world, through his ex- 
alted faith; and he is below the least of men, through the mo- 
desty of his sentiments. His virtue seeks not, in pride, the in- 
demnity of its sufferings : that is the first enemy which it attacks; 
and, in that divine philosophy, the most heroical actions are no- 
thing, from the moment that we count them as any thing our- 
selves : it considers glory as an error, prosperity as a misfortune, 
elevation as a precipice, afflictions as favours, the earth as a place 
of exilement, all that happens as a dream. What is this new 
language? What man prior to Jesus Christ hath ever spoken in 
this manner'? And if his disciples, merely in consequence of 
having announced this divine doctrine, were taken by a whole 
people for gods descended upon the earth, what worship shall 
they have it in their power to refuse to him who is the Author 
of it, and in whose name they announce it? 

But let us leave these general reflections, and come to the 
more precise duties of that love and dependence which his doc- 
trine exacts of men with regard to himself. He commands us 



504 



THE DIVINITY OF [Serm. XXVIII. 



to love him as he commands us to love his Father: he insists 
that we dwell in him, that is to say, that we establish ourselves 
in him, that we seek our happiness in him, as in his Father; that 
we direct all our actions, all our thoughts, all our desires, that we 
direct ourselves to his glory, as to the glory of his Father. Sins 
themselves are not remitted but to those who sincerely love him; 
and all the righteousness of the just, and the reconciliation of the 
sinner, are the effects of the love which we have for him. What 
is this man who comes to usurp the place of God in our hearts? 
Is a creature worthy of being loved for itself, and every noble 
and estimable quality which it may possess, is it not the sole gift 
of him who alone is worthy of all love? 

What prophet prior to Jesus Christ had ever spoken thus to 
men, — You shall love me; whatever you do, you shall do it for 
my glory. You shall love the Lord your God, said Moses to the 
children of Israel. Nothing is amiable in itself but what can be- 
stow happiness upon us: now, no creature can be our happiness 
or our perfection: no creature, consequently, is worthy of being 
loved for itself; it would be an idolatry. Any man, who comes 
to propose himself to men as the object of their love, is impious 
and an impostor, who seeks to usurp the most essential right 
of the Supreme Being: he is a monster of pride and folly, who 
wants to erect altars to himself, even in hearts, the only sanc- 
tuary which the divinity had never yielded up to profane idols. 
The doctrine of Jesus Christ, that doctrine so divine, and so 
much admired even by the pagans, would no longer, in that case, 
be but a monstrous mixture of impiety, of presumption, and of 
folly, if, not being himself the God blessed in all ages, he had 
made that love which he exacted of his disciples the most es- 
sential precept of his morality; and it would be a ridiculous 
mark of ostentation in him, to have held himself out to men as 
a model of humility and modesty, while, in fact, he was carrying 
presumption and unlimited compliance to a degree far beyond 
all the proudest philosophers, who had never aspired to more 
than the esteem and the applauses of men. 

Nor is this all : Not only Jesus Christ insists that we love him, 
but he also exacts of men marks of the most disinterested and 
most heroical love. He insists that we love him more than our 
relations, than our friends, than our fortune, than our life, than 
the whole world, than ourselves; that we suffer all for his sake, 
that we renounce all for him, that we shed, even to the last drop, 
our blood for him: whoever renders not to him these grand 
homages, is unworthy of him: whoever puts him in competition 
with any creature, or with himself, insults and dishonours him, 
and forfeits every pretension to his promises. 

What ! my brethren, he is not satisfied, as the idols, and even 
the true God himself had appeared to be, with the sacrifices of 
goats and bulls? He carries his pretensions still farther, and 
requires of man the sacrifice of himself; that he fly to gibbets; 



Serm. XXVIIL] JESUS CHRIST. 



505 



that he offer himself to death and to martyrdom for the glory 
of his name ! But if he he not the Master of our life, by what 
right doth he exact it of us? If our soul be not originally come 
from him, is it to him that we ought to return it? Is that re- 
gaining it, to have lost it for his sake? If he be not the Author 
of our being, do we not become sacrilegious and murderers, 
when we sacrifice ourselves for his glory, and when we transfer 
to a creature, and to a simple messenger of God, the grand 
sacrifice of our being, solely destined to confess the sovereignty 
and the power of the eternal Maker, who hath drawn us from 
nothing? That Jesus Christ die for himself, well and good, 
for the glory of God, and even that he exhort us to follow his 
example: many prophets before him had died for the Lord's 
sake, and had exhorted their disciples to walk in their steps. But 
that Jesus Christ, if he be not God himself, should order us to 
die for himself, should exact of men that last proof of love; 
that he should command us to offer up a life for him which we 
hold not of him; is it possible that men should have ever ex- 
isted upon the earth so vulgar and so stupid as to allow them- 
selves to be led away by the extravagance of such a doctrine? 
Is it possible that maxims so ridiculous and so impious should 
have been able to triumph over the whole universe, to over- 
throw all sects, to recal all minds, and to prevail over every 
thing which had hitherto appeared exalted, either in learning, 
in doctrine, or in the wisdom of the earth? And, if we consider 
as barbarians those savage nations who make a sacrifice of 
themselves upon the tombs and ashes of their relations and 
friends, why should we view, in a more respectable light, those 
disciples of Jesus Christ who have sacrificed themselves for his 
sake ? And shall not his religion be equally a religion of bar- 
barity and of blood? 

Yes, my brethren, the Agneses, the Lucias, the Agathas, those 
first martyrs of faith and of modesty, would then have sacrificed 
themselves to a mortal man. And, in preferring to shed their 
blood rather than to bend the knee before vain idols they 
would have shunned one idolatry only in order to fall into an- 
other more condemnable, in dying for Jesus Christ. The gene- 
rous avowers of faith would then have been only a set of des- 
perate and fanatical men, who, like madmen, had run to death. 
The tradition of the martyrs would then be no longer but the 
list of an impious and bloody scene. The tyrants and persecu- 
tors would then have been the defenders of righteousness, and 
of the glory of the divinity, — Christianity itself a sacrilegious and 
profane sect. The human race would then have totally erred. 
And the blood of the martyrs, far from having been the seed of 
believers, would have answered the sole purpose of inundating 
the whole universe with superstition and idolatry.— O God! 
can the ear of man listen to such blasphemies without horror? 



506 



THE DIVINITY OF [Serm. XXVIII. 



and what more is necessary to overthrow unbelief than to show 
it to itself? 

Such are our first duties towards Jesus Christ; to sacrifice 
to him our inclinations, our friends, our relations, our fortune, 
our life itself, and, in a word, whatever may stand in the way 
of our salvation: it is to confess his divinity; it is to acknow- 
ledge that he alone can supply the place of all that we forsake 
for him, and render to us even more than we quit, by giving to 
us himself. It is he alone, says the apostle John, who contemns 
the world and all its pleasures, who confesses that Jesus Christ 
is the Son of God, because he thereby pronounces that Jesus 
Christ is greater than the world, more capable of rendering us 
happy, and consequently more worthy of our love. 

But it is not sufficient to have considered the spirit of the 
ministry of Jesus Christ in his doctrine; it is necessary to con- 
sider it, secondly, in the special favours and blessings which 
the universe has received from him. He came to deliver all 
men from eternal death ; from enemies of God, as they were, 
he hath rendered them his children; he hath secured to them 
the possession of the kingdom of God, and of immutable riches; 
he hath brought to them the knowledge of salvation and the 
doctrine of truth. These gifts so magnificent, have not ended 
even with him. Seated on the right hand of his Father, he still 
sheds them over our hearts; all our miseries still find their 
remedy in him; he nourishes us with his body; he washes us 
from our stains by continually applying to us the price of his 
blood; he forms pastors to conduct us; he inspires prophets to 
instruct us; he sanctifies righteous characters to animate us by 
their example; he is continually present in our hearts to com- 
fort all their wants: Man hath no passion which his grace doth 
not cure, no affliction which it doth not render pleasing, no 
power but what springs from him; in a word, he assures us 
himself that he is our way, our truth, our life, our right- 
eousness, our redemption, our light. What new doctrine is 
this? Can a single man be the source of so many benefits 
to other men? Can the sovereign God, so jealous of his 
glory, attach us to a creature, by duties and ties so intimate and 
sacred, that we depend almost more upon that creature than 
upon himself? Would there be no danger that a man, become 
so beneficial and so necessary to other men, should at last be- 
come their idol? That a man, author and dispenser of so many 
blessings, and who discharges, with regard to us, the office and 
all the functions of a god, should likewise, in a little time, oc- 
cupy his place in our hearts? 

For observe, my brethren, that it is gratitude alone which 
hath formerly made so many gods. Men, neglecting the Author 
of their being and of the universe, worshipped, at first, the air 
which enabled them to live, the earth which nourished them, 



Serm. XXVIIL] JESUS CHRIST. 



507 



the sun which gave them light, and the moon which presided 
over the night: such were there Cybeles, their Apollos, their 
Dianas. They worshipped those conquerors who had delivered 
them from their enemies; those benevolent and upright princes 
who had rendered their subjects happy, and the memory of their 
reign immortal; and Jupiter and Hercules were placed in the 
rank of gods, the one for the number of his victories, and the 
other in consequence of the happiness and tranquillity of his 
reign: in the ages of superstition and credulity, men knew no 
other gods than those who were serviceable to them. And such 
is the character of man; his worship is but his love and his 
gratitude. 

Now, what man hath ever benefited mankind so much as 
Jesus Christ? Recollect all that the pagan ages have told us of 
the history of their gods, and see if they believed themselves 
indebted to them what unbelief itself acknowledges, with the 
holy books, the world to be indebted to Jesus Christ. To some 
they thought themselves indebted for favourable winds and a 
fortunate navigation; to others for the fertility of seasons; to 
their Mars for success in battle; to their Janus for the peace 
and tranquillity of the people; to Esculapius for their health. 
But what are these weak benefits, if you compare them to those 
which Jesus Christ hath showered upon the earth ? He hath 
brought to it an eternal peace, a lasting happiness, righteousness 
and truth; he hath made of it a new world and a new earth; he 
hath not loaded a single people with his benefits, he hath loaded 
all nations, the whole universe; and, what is more, he hath be- 
come our benefactor only by suffering as our victim. What 
could he do more exalted or more noble for the earth? If grati- 
tude hath made gods, could Jesus Christ fail to find worship- 
pers among men? And, were it possible that any excess could 
take place in our love and in our gratitude to him, was it at all 
proper that we should be so deeply indebted to him? 

Again, if Jesus Christ, in dying, had informed his disciples 
that to the Lord alone they were indebted for so many benefits, 
that he himself had been merely the instrument, and not the 
author and source of all these special favours, and that they 
ought, consequently, to forget him, and to render to God that 
glory which was due to him alone: but very differently than 
with such instructions doth Jesus Christ terminate his wonders 
and his ministry. He not only requires that his disciples forget 
him not, and that they do not cease, even after his death, to 
hope in him; but, on the point of quitting them, he assures 
them that, even to the consummation of time, he will be present 
with them; he promises still more than he hath already be- 
stowed upon them, and attaches them for ever to himself by 
indissoluble and immortal ties. 

In effect, the promises which, in that last moment, he makes 
to them, are still more astonishing than all the favours he had 



308 



THE DIVINITY OF [Serm. XXVIII. 



granted to them during his life. In the first place, he promises 
to them the consoling Spirit, which he calls the Spirit of his 
Father: that Spirit of the Truth which the world cannot re- 
ceive; that Spirit of energy which was to form the martyrs; 
that Spirit of intelligence which was to enlighten the prophets; 
that Spirit of wisdom which was to conduct the pastors; that 
Spirit of peace and charity which, of all believers, was to make 
only one heart and one soul. What right hath Jesus Christ 
over the Spirit of God, to dispose of it at his pleasure, and to 
promise it to men, if it be not his own Spirit? Elijah, ascend- 
ing to heaven, looks upon it as a thing hardly possible to pro- 
mise to Eliseus, individually his twofold spirit of zeal and pro- 
phecy: how far was he from promising to him the eternal Spirit 
of the heavenly Father, that Spirit of liberty which agitates 
where he thinks fit! Nevertheless, the promises of Jesus Christ 
are accomplished; scarcely hath he ascended to heaven when 
the Spirit of God descends upon the disciples; the illiterate be- 
come at once more learned than all the sages and philosophers; 
the weak more powerful than the tyrants; the foolish, accord- 
ing to the world, more prudent than all the wisdom of the age. 
New men, animated with a new Spirit, appear upon the earth; 
they attract all to walk in their steps; they change the face of 
the universe; and, even to the end of ages, shall that Spirit 
animate his church, form righteous souls, overthrow the unbe- 
lieving, console his disciples, sustain them amid persecutions 
ajid disgraces, and shall bear witness in the bottom of their 
heart that they are the children of God, and that they are en- 
titled, through that august title, to more real and more solid 
riiches than all those of which the world can ever despoil 
them. 

Secondly, Jesus Christ promises to his disciples the keys of 
he^aven and of hell, and the power of remitting sins. What ! 
my brethren, the Jews are deeply offended when he pretends to 
remit them himself, and when he seems to attribute to himself 
a p»ower reserved to God alone; but, how will all nations of the 
earth be scandalized when they shall read, in his gospel, that he 
hath even delegated his power to his disciples? And, if he be 
not God, hath the mind of man ever imagined such an instance 
of temerity and folly? What right, in effect, hath he over con- 
sciences, to bind or to unbind them at his pleasure, and to 
transfer to weak men a power which he himself could not exer- 
cise without blasphemy! 

Thirdly, But this is not all; he promises to his disciples the 
gift likewise of miracles; that in his name, they should raise 
up tlhe dead; that they should restore sight to the blind, health 
to the sick, and speech to the dumb; that they should be mas- 
ters of all nature. Moses promises not to his disciples the gifts 
with which the Lord had favoured him: he is sensible that the 
power is not his own, and that the Lord alone can bestow it on 



Serm. XXVIII.] JESUS CHRIST. 



509 



whomsoever he may think fit. Thus, after his death, when 
Joshua arrests the sun in the middle of his course, in order to 
complete the victory over the enemies of the people of God, it 
is not in the name of Moses that the commands that planet to 
stand still; it is not of him that he holds the power of making 
even the stars obedient to him; when he wishes to exercise it, 
it is not to him that he addresses himself: but the disciples of 
Jesus Christ can operate nothing but in the name of their Mas- 
ter; it is in his name that they raise up the dead and make the 
lame to walk; and, without the assistance of that divine name, 
they are equally weak as the rest of men. The ministry and 
the power of Moses terminate with his life; the ministry and 
the power of Jesus Christ only begin, as I may say, after his 
death, and we are assured that his reign is to be eternal. 

What more shall I say? He promises to his disciples the 
conversion of the universe, the triumph of the cross, the com- 
pliance of all the nations of the earth, of philosophers, of Caesars, 
of tyrants; and that his gospel shall be received by the whole 
world: but, doth he hold the hearts of all men in his hands 
thus to answer for a charge of which the world had hitherto no 
example? You will, no doubt, tell us, that God layeth open the 
future to his servant. But you are mistaken : if he be not God, 
he is not even a prophet; his predictions are dreams and chi- 
meras: it is a false spirit which seduces him, and which is con- 
cerned in his knowledge of the future, and the sequel hath 
belied the truth of his promises: he prophesies that all nations, 
seated under the shadow of death, shall open their eyes to the 
light; and he sees not that they are on the point of falling into 
a more criminal blindness in worshipping him; he prophesies 
that his Father shall be glorified, and that his gospel shall every- 
where form to him worshippers in spirit and in truth; and he 
sees not that men are going for ever to dishonour him, in 
placing upon an equality with him, even to the end of ages, 
that Jesus who ought to have been considered only as his 
servant and prophet: he prophesies that idols shall be over- 
thrown; and he sees not that he himself shall occupy their 
place: he prophesies that he will form to himself a holy people 
of every tongue and of every tribe; and he sees not that he 
comes only to form a new people of idolators of every na- 
tion, who shall place him in the temple as the living God; 
whose actions, worship, and homages shall all be directed to 
him; who shall do all for his glory; who shall depend solely 
upon him, live only for and through him, and have neither 
force nor energy but what they receive from him: in a word, 
who shall worship him, who shall love him a thousand times 
more spiritually, more intimately, and more universally, than 
ever the pagans had worshipped their idols. This, then, is not 
even a prophet; and his relations, according to the flesh, are 
guilty of no blasphemy when they say " he is beside himself," 



510 



THE DIVINITY OF [Serm. XXVIII. 



and that he bestows, on the dreams of a heated imagination all 
the weight and reality of of revelations and mysteries. 

Behold to what unbelief conducts. Overturn the foundation, 
which is the Lord Jesus, eternal Son of the living God, and the 
whole edifice tumbles in pieces: take away the grand mystery 
of piety, and all the religion is but a dream: deny the divinity 
of Jesus Christ, and you cut off, from the doctrine of Christians, 
all the merit of faith, all the consolation of hope, all the motives 
of charity. Thus, with what zeal did not the first disciples of 
the gospel oppose those impious men who, from that time, ven- 
tured to attack the glory of their Master's divinity? They well 
knew that it was striking at the heart of their religion; that it 
was ravishing from them the only alleviation of their persecu- 
tions and sufferings, all confidence in the promises to come, and 
all the dignity and grandeur of their pretensions; and that, 
that principle once overthrown, the whole religion dissipated in 
smoke, and was no longer but a human doctrine and the sect of 
a mortal man, who, like all the other chiefs, had left nothing 
but his name to his disciples. 

Thus, the pagans themselves then reproached the Christians 
with rendering divine honours to their Christ. Pliny, a Ro- 
man proconsul, celebrated for his works, giving an account to 
the emperor Trajan of their morals and doctrine; after being 
forced to confess that the Christians were pious, innocent, and 
upright men, and that they assembled before the rising of the 
sun, not to concert the commission of crimes, or to disturb the 
peace of the empire, but to live in piety and righteousness, to 
detest frauds, adulteries, and even the coveting of the wealth 
of others; he only reproaches them with chaunting hymns in 
honour of their Christ, and of rendering to him the same ho- 
mages as to a god. Now, if these first believers had not ren- 
dered divine honours to Jesus Christ, they would have justified 
themselves against that calumny; they would have rejected that 
scandal from their religion, almost the only one which shocked 
the zeal of the Jews and the wisdom of the Gentiles; they 
would openly have said, — We do not worship Jesus Christ, for 
we know better than to transfer to a creature that honour and 
worship which are due to God alone. Nevertheless, they make 
no reply to this accusation. Their apologists refute all the 
other calumnies with which the pagans endeavoured to blacken 
their doctrine; they clear up and overthrow the slightest accu- 
sations; and their apologies, addressed to the senate, attract to 
them even the admiration of Rome, and impose silence on their 
enemies. And, upon the accusation of idolatry towards Jesus 
Christ, which should be the most crying and the most horrible; 
upon the reproach of worshipping a crucified person, which was 
the most likely to discredit them, and which ought indeed to 
have been the most grievous to men so holy, so declared against 
idolatry, and so jealous of the glory of God, they are totally 



Serm. XXVIIL] JESUS CHRIST. 511 



silent; and, far from defending themselves, they even justify 
the accusation hy their silence? What do I say! By their 
silence? They authorise it by their language, in professing 
to suffer for his name, in dying for him, in confessing him 
before the tyrants, in joyfully expiring upon gibbets, in the 
sweet expectation of going to enjoy him, and of receiving, in 
his bosom, a more immortal life than that which they had lost 
for his glory. They suffered martyrdom rather than bend to 
the statue of the Caesars, rather than allow their pagan friends, 
through a human compassion, and to save them from torture, 
to falsely attest, before the magistrates, that they had offered 
incense to the idols, and they would have submitted to the ac- 
cusation of paying divine honours to Jesus Christ, without any 
attempt to destroy the imputation? Ah! they would have pro- 
claimed the contrary from the house-tops; they would have ex- 
posed themselves even to death, rather than to have given room 
to so hateful and so execrable a suspicion. What can unbelief 
oppose to this? And, if it be an error to equal Jesus Christ to 
God, it is an error which has been born with the church, and 
upon which the whole structure hath been reared; which has 
formed so many martyrs, and converted the whole universe. 

But what fruit, my brethren, are we to draw from this dis- 
course? That Jesus Christ is the grand object of Christian 
piety. Nevertheless, scarcely do we know Jesus Christ: we 
never consider that all the other practices of piety are, as I 
may say, arbitrary; but that this is the ground- work of faith 
and of salvation; that this is pure and sincere piety; that, con- 
tinually to meditate upon Jesus Christ, to have resource to him, 
to nourish ourselves with his doctrine, to enter into the spirit 
of his mysteries, to study his actions, to count solely upon the 
merit of his blood and of his sacrifice, is the only true know- 
ledge and the most essential duty of the believer. Remember, 
then, my brethren, that piety towards Jesus Christ is the cor- 
dial spirit of the Christian religion; that nothing is solid but 
what you shall build upon that foundation; and that the prin- 
cipal homage which he expects of you is, that you become like 
him, and that his life be the model of your own, in order 
that, through your resemblance to him, you may be included 
in the number of those who shall be partakers of his gloy. 



512 THE RESURRECTION [Serm. XXIX. 

SERMON XXIX. 
ON THE RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS. 
John xi. M. 
Come and see. 

The most hardened sinner could never submit to the horror 
of his situation, were he able to see and to know himself such 
as he is. A soul grown old in guilt, is only bearable to itself, 
because that the same passion, from which all his miseries 
spring, conceals them from him, and that his disorder is, at 
the same time, both the weapon which inflicts the wound and 
the fatal bandage which hides it from the eyes of the patient. 

Behold wherefore the church, in order to lay the sinner open 
to himself during this time of penitence, almost continually 
displays to us, under various images, the deplorable state of a 
soul who has grown old in his iniquity: one while under the 
figure of a paralytic young man; that is, to mark to us the in- 
sensibility and fatal ease which always follow habitual guilt: 
another, under the symbol of a prodigal reduced to feed with the 
vilest animals; and, under these traits, it wishes to make us 
feel his abasement and his infamy: again, under the image of 
a person born blind, and that is in order to paint to us the 
depth and the horror of his blindness: and, lastly, under the 
parable of a deaf and dumb person possessed with a devil; and 
that is, more animatedly to figure to us the subjection under 
which habitual guilt holds all the powers of an unfortunate 
soul. 

To-day, in order, as it were, to assemble all these traits un- 
der a single image, still more terrible and striking, the church 
proposes to us Lazarus in the tomb, dead for four days, emitting 
stench and infection, bound hand and foot, his face covered 
with a napkin, and exciting only horror even in those whom af- 
fection and blood had most closely united to him in life. 

Come then and see, you, my dear hearer, who live, for so 
many years past, under the shameful yoke of dissipation, and 
who are insensible to the misery of your situation. Approach 
this tomb which the voice of Jesus Christ is now to open before 
your eyes; and, in that spectacle of infection and putrefaction, 
behold the true picture of your soul. You fly to profane spec- 
tacles, in order to see your passions represented under pleasing 
and deceitful colours: approach, and see them expressed here 
such as they are : come, and, in that infectious and loathsome 



Serm. XXIX.] OF LAZARUS. 



513 



carcase, behold what you are in the sight of God, and how 
much your situation is worthy of your tears. 

But in exposing here only the horrible situation of a soul who 
lives in disorder, lest I trouble and discourage, without holding 
out to him a hand in order to assist him in quitting that abyss; 
that I may omit nothing of our gospel, I shall divide it into three 
reflections: in the first, you will see how shocking and deplor- 
able is the situation of a soul who lives in habitual irregularity; 
in the second, I shall show to you the means by which he may 
quit it; and, in the third, what the motives are which determine 
Jesus Christ to operate the miracle of his resurrection and de- 
liverance. O my God ! let thine all-powerful voice be now heard 
by those unfortunate souls who sleep in the darkness and shadow 
of death; command these withered bones once more to be ani- 
mated, and to recover that light and that life of grace which 
they have lost. 

Reflection I. I remark, at first, three principal circum-» 
stances in the deplorable spectacle which Lazarus, dead and 
buried, offers to our eyes. 1st, Already become a mass of worms 
and corruption, he spreads infection and stench: and behold 
the profound corruption of a soul in habitual sin. 2dly, A 
gloomy napkin covers his eyes and his face; and behold the 
fatal blindness of a soul in habitual sin. Lastly, He appears in 
the tomb bound hand and foot: and behold the melancholy 
subjection, of a soul in habitual sin. Now, it is that profound 
corruption, that fatal blindness, and that melancholy servitude, 
typified in the spectacle of Lazarus, dead and buried, which 
precisely form all the horror and all the wretchedness of a soul 
long dead in the eyes of God. 

In the first place, There is not a more natural image of a soul 
grown old in iniquity, than that of a carcase already a prey to 
worms and putrefaction. Thus the holy books everywhere re- 
present the state of sin under the idea of a shocking death; and 
it seems as if the Spirit of God had found that melancholy im- 
age the most calculated to give us, at least, a glimpse of all the 
deformity of a soul in which sin dwells. 

Now, two effects are produced on the body by death; it deprives 
it of life; it afterwards alters all its features, and corrupts all 
its members. It deprives it of life; in the same manner it is 
that sin begins to disfigure the beauty of the soul. For, God 
is the life of our souls, the light of our minds, and the spring, 
as I may say, of our hearts. Our righteousness, our wisdom, 
our truth, are only the union of a righteous, wise, and true God 
with our soul: all our virtues are only the different influences 
of his Spirit which dwells within us; it is he who exciteth our 
good desires, who formeth our holy thoughts, who produceth 
our pure lights, who operateth our righteous propensities; inso- 



514 



ON THE RESURRECTION [Serm. XXIX. 



much that all the spiritual and supernatural life of our soul is 
only, as the apostle speaks, the life of God within us. 

Now, by a single sin, that life ceases, that light is extinguished, 
that spirit withdraws, all these springs are suspended. Thus 
the soul, without God, is a soul without life, without motion, 
light, truth, righteousness, or charity; it is no longer but a chaos, 
a dead body: its life is no longer but an imaginary and chimer- 
ical life; and, like those inanimate substances set in motion by 
a foreign influence, it seems to live and to act: but " it is dead 
while living." 

Behold the first degree of death, which every sin that sepa- 
rates a soul from God introduces into it; but habitual sin, like 
inveterate death, goes further. Thus, Lazarus not only is with- 
out life in the tomb, but, having been there for four days, the 
corruption of his body begins to spread infection. For although 
the first sin, which causes the loss of grace, leave us, in the eyes 
of God, without life and without motion; yet we may say, that 
certain impressions of the Holy Spirit, certain seeds of spiritual 
life, certain means of recovering the grace lost, still remain to 
us. Faith is not yet extinguished: the feelings of virtue not 
yet effaced; a sense of the truths of salvation not yet lost: it is 
a dead body in truth; but life being only just withdrawn, it 
still preserves, I know not what, of marks of warmth, which 
seem to spring from some remain of life. But, in proportion as 
the soul remains in death, and preserves in guilt, grace with- 
draws; all extinguishes, all changes, all corrupts, and its cor- 
ruption becomes universal. 

I say universal; yes, my brethren, all changes, all corrupts 
in the soul, through a continuance of disorder; the gifts of na- 
ture gentleness, rectitude, humanity, modesty, even the mental 
talents; the blessings of grace, the feelings of religion, the re- 
morses of conscience, the terrors of faith, and faith itself; the 
corruption penetrates all, and changes, into putrefaction and a 
spectacle of horror, both the gifts of heaven and the blessings of 
the earth: nothing remains in its original situation; the loveliest 
features are those which become the most hideous and the most 
un distinguishable; the charms of wit become the seasoning of 
debauchery and the passions; feelings of religion are changed 
into free-thinking; superiority of knowledge into pride and a 
vain and shocking philosophy; nobility of mind is no longer 
but a boundless ambition; generosity and tenderness of heart 
but a yielding to the sway of impure and profane connexions; 
the principles of glory and honour, handed down to us with the 
blood of our ancestors, but a vain ostentation, and the source of 
all our hatreds and animosities: our rank, our elevation, the 
cause of our envies and mean jealousies: lastly, our riches and 
our prosperity, the fatal instrument of all our crimes. 

But the corruption is not confined to the sinner alone; a dead 



Serm. XXIX.] OF LAZARUS. 



515 



body cannot be long concealed without a smell of death being 
spread around; it is impossible to live long in debauchery without 
the smell of a bad life making itself felt. In vain is every precau- 
tion employed to conceal the ignomy of a disorderly life; in 
vain is the sepulchre, full of putrefaction and infection, exter- 
nally whitened and embellished, the stench spreads; guilt, soon- 
er or later, betrays itself; a black and , infectious air always 
proceeds from that profane fire which, with so much care, 
was concealed. A disorderly life betrays itself in a thousand 
ways; the public, at last undeceived, opens its eyes, and the 
more their character becomes blown, the more they discover 
themselves; they become accustomed to their shame; they be- 
come weary of constraint and decency; that guilt which is only 
to be purchased with attention and arguments, appears too 
dear; they unmask themselves: they throw off that remainder 
of restraint and modesty which made us still cautious of the 
eyes of men; they wish to riot in disorder, without precaution 
or care; and then, servants, friends, connexions, the city and 
country, all feel the infection of their irregularities and example. 
Our rank, our elevation, no longer serve but to render more 
striking and more durable the scandal of our debaucheries; in a 
thousand places our excesses serve as a model : the view of our 
manners perhaps strengthens, in secret, consciences whom guilt 
still rendered uneasy: perhaps they even cite us, and make use 
of our example in seducing innocence, and in conquering a still 
timorous modesty: and, even after our death, the fame of our de- 
baucheries shall stain the history of men; shall perhaps embellish 
lascivious tales : and long after our day, in ages yet to come, the 
remembrance of our crimes shall still be an occasion and a source 
of guilt. 

Lastly, But I would not dare to enlarge here. The corruption 
which habitual guilt sheds through the whole interior of the sin- 
ner is so universal that even his body is infected; debauchery 
leaves the shameful marks of his irregularities on his flesh : the 
infection of his soul often extends even to a body which he has 
made subservient to ignominy. He says, in advance, to corrup- 
tion, like Job, " thou art my father; and to the worm, thou 
art my mother and my sister;" the corruption of his body is a 
shocking picture of that of his soul. 

Great God! can I then flatter myself that thou wilt yet cast 
upon me some looks of compassion ! Wilt thou not groan at the 
sight of that mass of crimes and putrefaction which my soul pre- 
sents to thine eyes, as thou now groanest in the spirit over the 
tomb of Lazarus? Ah ! avert thine holy eyes from the spectacle of 
my profound wretchedness; but let me no more turn away 
from it myself, and let me be enabled to view myself with all 
that horror which my situation deserves; tear asunder the veil 
which hides me from myself ; my evils shall in part be done 
away from the moment that I shall be able to see and to know 
them. 



516 



ON THE RESURRECTION [Sum. XXIX. 



And behold the second circumstance of the deplorable situa- 
tion of Lazarus; a mournful cloth covers his face: that is the 
profound blindness which forms the second character of habitual 
sin. 

I confess that every sin is an error which makes us mistake 
evil for good; it is a false judgment which makes us seek, in the 
creature, that ease, grandeur, and independence which we can 
find in God alone: it is a mist which hides order, truth, and 
righteousness from our eyes, and, in their place, substitutes vain 
phantoms. Nevertheless, a first falling off from God does not 
altogether extinguish our lights; nor is it always productive of 
total darkness. It is true that the Spirit of God, source of all 
light, retires, and no longer dwells within us; but some traces 
of light are still left in the soul: thus, though the sun be already 
withdrawn from our hemisphere, yet certain rays of his light 
still tinge the sky, and form as it were, an imperfect day; it is 
only in proportion as he sinks that gloom gains, and the dark- 
ness of night at last prevails. In the same manner, in propor- 
tion as sin degenerates into habit, the light of God retires, dark- 
ness gains, and the profound night of total blindness at last 
arrives. 

And then all becomes occasion of error to the criminal soul: 
all changes its aspect to his eyes; the most shameful passions no 
longer appear but as weaknesses; the most criminal attachments 
but sympathies brought with us into the world and inherent to 
our hearts: the excesses of the table but innocent pleasures of 
society; revenge but a just sense of injury; licentious and im- 
pious conversations but lively and agreeable sallies; the blackest 
defamation but a customary language of which none but weak 
and timid minds can make a scruple; the laws of the church 
but old-fashioned customs; the severity of God's judgments but 
absurd declamations, which equally disgrace his goodness and 
mercy; death in sin, inevitable consequence of a criminal life, 
mere predictions, in which there is more of zeal than of truth, 
and refuted by the confidence which a return to God, previous 
to that last moment, promises to us: lastly, heaven, the earth, 
hell, all creatures, religion, crimes, virtues, good and evil, things 
present and to come, ail change their aspect to the eyes of a soul 
who lives in habitual guilt; all show themselves under false ap- 
pearances; his whole life is no longer but a delusion and a con- 
tinued error. Alas ! could you tear away the fatal veil which 
covers your eyes, like those of Lazarus, and behold yourself like 
him, buried in darkness; all covered with putrefaction, and 
spreading around infection and a smell of death! But now, says 
our Saviour, all these things are hid from thine eyes; you see 
in yourself only the embellishments and the pompous externals 
of the fatal tomb in which you drag on in sin; your rank, your 
birth, your talents, your dignities, your titles; that is to say, the 
trophies and the ornaments which the vanity of men has there 



Serm. XXIX.] OF LAZARUS. 



51T 



raised up; but, remove the stone which covers that place of 
horror; look within, judge not of yourself from these pompous 
outsides, which serve only to embellish your carcase; see what, 
in the eyes of God, you are; and, if the corruption and the pro- 
found blindness of your soul touch you not, let its slavery at 
least rouse and recal you to yourself. 

Last circumstance of the situation of Lazarus dead and buri- 
ed; he was bound hand and foot: and behold the image of the 
wretched slavery of a soul long under the dominion of sin. 

Yes, my brethren, in vain does the world decry a Christian 
life as a life of subjection and slavery: The reign of righteousness 
is a reign of liberty; the soul, faithful and submissive to God, 
becomes master over all creatures; the just man is above all, 
because he is unconnected with all; he is master of the world, 
because he despises the world: he is dependent neither on his 
master, because he only serves them for God, nor on his friends, 
because he only loves them according to the order of charity 
and of righteousness; nor on his inferiors, because he exacts 
from them no iniquitous compliance; nor on his fortune, because 
he rather dreads it; nor on the judgments of men, because 
he dreads those of God alone; nor on events, because he 
considers them all as in the order of providence; nor even on 
his passions, because the charity which is within him is their rule 
and measure. The just man alone, then, enjoys a perfect liberty: 
superior to the world, to himself, to all creatures, to all events, 
he begins, even in this life, to reign with Jesus Christ; all is 
below him while he is himself inferior to God alone. 

But the sinner, who seems to live without either rule or re- 
straint, is, however, a vile slave ; he is dependent on all, on 
his body? on his propensities, on his caprices, on his passions, 
on his fortune, on his masters, on his friends, on his enemies, 
on his rivals, on all surrounding creatures; so many gods to 
which love or fear subject him; so many idols which multiply 
his slavery, while he thinks himself more free by casting off 
that obedience which he owes to God alone; he multiplies his 
masters, by refusing submission to him alone who renders free 
those who serve him, and who gives to his servants dominion 
over the world, and over every thing which the world contains. 

You often complain, my dear hearer, of the hardships of vir- 
tue; you dread a Christian life, as a life of subjection and sor- 
row: but what in it could you find so gloomy as you experience 
in debauchery? Ah! If you durst complain of the bitterness 
and of the tyranny of the passions; if you durst confess the 
troubles, the disgusts, the frenzies, the anxieties of your soul; 
if you were candid on the gloomy transactions of your heart, 
there is no lot but what would appear preferable to your own: 
but you disguise the inquietudes of guilt which you feel; and 
you exaggerate the hardships of virtue which you have never 
known. But, in order to hold out to you an assisting hand, let 
us continue the history of our gospel, and let us see, in the re- 



518 



ON THE RESURRECTION [Sebm. XXIX. 



surrection of Lazarus, what are the means offered to you, by 
the goodness of God, of quitting so deplorable a situation. 

Rfflection II. The power of God, says the apostle, is not 
less conspicuous in the conversion of sinners than in raising up 
the dead; and the same supernatural power which wrought 
upon Jesus Christ to deliver him from the tomb, ought to ope- 
rate upon the soul long dead in sin, in order to recal it to the 
life of grace. I find there only this difference, that the almighty 
voice of God meets no resistance from the body which he re- 
vives and recals to life: On the contrary, the soul, dead and 
corrupted, as I may say, through the long duration of guilt, 
seems to retain a remainder of strength and motion only to 
oppose that powerful voice which is heard even in the abyss in 
which it is plunged, and which resounds for the purpose of 
restoring it to light and life. Nevertheless, however diffi- 
cult may be the conversion of a soul of this description, and 
however rare such examples may be, the Spirit of God, in or- 
der to teach us never to despair of chvine mercy, when we sin- 
cerely wish to quit the ways of iniquity, points out to us at 
present, in the resurrection of Lazarus, the means of accom- 
plishing it. 

The first is, confidence in Jesus Christ: Lord, says Mary, 
the sister of Lazarus, if thou hadst been here my brother had 
not died; but I know that, even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask 
of God, God will give it thee. I am the resurrection and the 
life, said Jesus unto her; believest thou this? Yes, Lord, said 
she, I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which 
should come into the world. It is through this that the miracle 
of raising up Lazarus begins, viz. the perfect confidence that 
Jesus Christ is able to deliver him from death and corruption. 

For, my brethren, the delusion continually employed by the 
demon, in order to render our desires of conversion unavailing, 
and to counteract their progress, is that of despondency and 
mistrust: he warmly retraces to our imagination the horrors of 
an entire life of guilt; he says to us, in secret, that which the 
sisters of Lazarus say to Jesus Christ, though in a different 
sense, — that we ought, at a much earlier period, to have check- 
ed our career; that it is now impossible, when so far advanced, 
to return; that the time for attempting a change is now past; 
and that the virulency and age of our wounds no longer admit 
a resource. Upon this they abandon themselves to langour and 
indolence; and, after having incensed the righteousness of God 
through our debaucheries, we insult his mercy through the ex- 
cess of our mistrust. 

I confess that a soul long dead in sin must suffer much in 
returning to God; that it is difficult, after so many years of dis- 
sipation, to form to one's self a new heart and new inclinations; 
and that it is even fit that the obstacles, the sufferings, and the 



Serm. XXIX.] OF LAZARUS. 



519 



difficulties, which always attend the conversion of souls of that 
description, should make great sinners feel how dreadful it is to 
have been almost a whole lifetime removed from God. 

But I say, that, from the moment a truly contrite soul wishes 
to return to him, his wounds, however virulent or old, ought 
no longer to alarm his coufidence: I say, that his wretchedness 
ought to increase his compunction, hut not his despondency: I 
say, that the first step of his penitence ought to he that of ado- 
ring Jesus Christ as the resurrection and the life; a secret con- 
fidence that our wants are always less than his mercies; a firm 
persuasion that the blood of Jesus Christ is more powerful in 
washing out our stains than our corruption can be in contract- 
ing them: I say, that, the fewer resources of strength a crimi- 
nal soul may find in himself, the more ought he to expect from 
him who taketh delight in rearing up the work of grace upon 
the nothingness of nature; and that the more he is inwardly 
opposed to grace, the more does he, in one sense, become an 
object worthy of divine power and mercy, for God wisheth that 
all good shall evidently appear as coming from above, and that 
man shall attribute nothing to himself. 

And, in effect, my dear hearer, whatever may the horror of 
your past crimes be, the Lord will not long refuse you grace, 
from the moment that he hath inspired you with the desire and 
the resolution of asking it. It is written in Judges, that the 
father of Samson, terrified by the apparition of the angel of the 
Lord, who, after announcing to him the birth of a son, com- 
manded him to offer up a sacrifice, and then, like a devouring 
fire, consumed the victim and the pile, and vanished from his 
sight; that, terrified, I say, at that spectacle, he was convin- 
ced that both himself and his wife were to be struck with death 
because they had seen the Lord. But his wife, holy and en- 
lightened, condemned his mistrust. If the Lord, said she to 
him, wished to destroy us, he would not have made fire from 
heaven to descend on our sacrifice; he would not have accepted 
it from our hands; he would not have discovered to us his se- 
crets, and his wonders, and what we had hitherto been igno- 
rant of. 

And behold what I now answer to you. You believe your 
death and your destruction to be inevitable; the state of your 
conscience discourages you; in vain do sparks of grace and of 
light fall upon your heart; in vain do they touch you, solicit 
you, and almost gain the point of consuming the sacrifice of 
your passions: you persuade yourself that you are lost beyond 
resource. But, if the Lord wished to abandon and to destroy 
you, he would not make fire from heaven to descend upon your 
heart; he would not light up within you holy desires and senti- 
ments of penitence: if he wished to let you die in the blindness 
of your passions, he would not manifest to you the truths of 
salvation; he would not open your eyes on those miseries to 



520 ON THE RESURRECTION [Seiim. XXIX. 



come which you prepare for yourself. Besides, how do you 
know if Jesus Christ has not permitted your falling into such a 
deplorable state, for the purpose of making a prodigy of your 
conversion an incitement to the conversion of your brethren? 
How do you know if his mercy has not rendered your passions 
so notorious in order that thousands of sinners, witnesses of 
your errors, despair not of conversion, and be inflamed at the 
sight of your penitence? How do you know if your crimes, and 
even your scandals, have not entered into the designs of God's 
goodness with regard to your brethren; and if your situation, 
which seems hopeless, like that of Lazarus, is not rather an 
occasion of manifesting God's glory than a presage of death to 
you? 

When grace recals a common sinner, the fruit of his conver- 
sion is limited to himself; but, when it singles out a grand 
sinner, a Lazarus, long dead and corrupted, ah! the designs of 
its mercy are then much more extensive: in one change it pre- 
pares a thousand to come; it raises up a thousand out of one; 
and the crimes of a sinner become the seed of a thousand just. 
You give way to despondency in feeling the extremity of your 
wretchedness; but it is perhaps that very extremity which 
draws you nearer to the happy moment of your conversion, and 
which the goodness of God has reserved for you, that you might 
be a public monument of the excess of his mercies towards the 
greatest sinners. Only believe, as Jesus Christ said to the sisters 
of Lazarus, and you shall see the glory of God; you shall see your 
relations, your friends, your inferiors, and even the accomplices 
of your debaucheries, become imitators of your penitence; you 
shall see the most hopeless souls sighing after the happiness of 
your new life; and the world itself forced to render glory to 
God, and, in recalling your past errors, to admire the prodigy 
of your present lot. Take, even from your wretchedness itself, 
new motives of confidence: bless, in advance, the merciful wis- 
dom of that Being, who, even from your passions, shall know 
how to extract advantages to his glory; every thing co-operates 
towards the salvation of his chosen, and he permitteth great ex- 
cesses only in order to operate great mercies. God ever wish- 
eth the salvation of his creature; and, from the moment that we 
form a wish of returning to him, our only dread ought to be, 
not that his justice reject us, but lest our intention be not sin- 
cere. 

And the surest proof of our sincerity is the absenting our- 
selves from every occasion which may place an obstacle to our 
resurrection and our deliverance; obstacle, figured by the stone 
which shut up the mouth of Lazarus's tomb, and which Jesus 
Christ orders to be removed before he begins to operate the 
miracle of his resurrection : remove the stone. Second mean, 
marked in our gospel. 

In effect, every day shows sinners, who, tired of disorder. 



Serm. XXIX.] OF LAZARUS. 



521 



wish to return to God, but who cannot prevail upon themselves to 
quit those objects, those places, those situations, and those rocks, 
which have been the cause of their removal from him: they 
vainly persuade themselves that they shall be able to extinguish 
their passions, to terminate a disorderly life; in a word, to rise 
from the dead, without removing the stone. They even make 
some efforts: they address themselves to men and God; they 
adopt measures for a change; but it is of those measures which, 
not removing the dangers, do not, in the smallest degree, for- 
ward their safety; and thus their whole life sorrowfully passes 
away in detesting their chains, and in the utter inability of 
breaking them asunder. 

Whence comes this, my brethren? It is that the passions 
begin to weaken only after the removal of such objects as have 
lighted them up; it is absurd to suppose that the heart can 
change while every thing around us continues, with regard to 
us, the same: You would become chaste, yet you live in the 
midst of the dangers, the connexions, the familiarities, the 
pleasures, which have a thousand times corrupted your heart; 
you would wish to reflect seriously on your eternity, and to 
place some interval betwixt life and death, yet you are unwill- 
ing to place any betwixt death and those debaucheries which 
prevent you from reflecting on your salvation ; and, in the midst 
of agitations, pleasures, trifles, and worldly expectations, from 
which, on no account, will you abate, you expect that the in- 
clination and relish for a Christian life will come to you un- 
sought-for: you would that your heart form new propensities, 
surrounded by every thing which nourishes and fortifies the 
I old; and that the lamp of faith and grace blaze up in the midst 
of winds and tempests, — that light which, even in the sanctuary, 
is so often extinguished through want of oil and nourishment, 
and, to lukewarm and retired souls, converts into a danger even 
the safety of their retreat. 

You come, after that, to tell us that good will is not wanting; 
that the moment is not yet come. How, indeed, should it come 
in the midst of every thing that repels it? But what is that 
good will, shut up within you, which has never any consequence, 
which never leads to any thing real, and never seriously adopts 
a single measure towards a change? That is to say, that you 
would wish to change could it be done for nothing; you would 
wish to work out your salvation by the same conduct which oc- 
casions your destruction; you would wish that the same man- 
ners which have separated your heart from God should approach 
you to him; and that what has hitherto been the cause of your 
ruin should itself become the way and the mean of your salva- 
tion. Begin by removing the occasions which so often have 
been, and still continue to be, the rock of your innocence; re- 
move the stone which shuts up the entry of grace to your soul; 
after that you shall be entitled to demand of God the comple- 



522 



ON THE RESURRECTION [Serm. XXIX. 



tion of his work in you. Then, separated from those objects 
which nourished iniquitous passions within you, you shall have 
it in your power to say to him, It is thy part now, O my God ! 
to change my heart; to thee I have sacrificed every attachment 
which might still fetter it; I have removed all the rocks upon 
which my weakness might still have split; as much as in me 
lay, I have changed the outward man; thou alone, O Lord, 
canst change the heart; it depends upon thee now to complete 
what yet remains to be done, to break the invisible chains, to 
overcome all internal obstacles, and totally to triumph over my 
corruption: I have removed the fatal stone which prevented me 
from hearing thy voice; let it now resound, even through the 
abyss in which I am still buried; command me to depart from 
that fatal tomb, that place of infection and putrescence, but 
command me with that almighty word which makes itself to be 
heard even by the dead, and is to them a word of resurrection 
and life; give me in charge to thy disciples, to be unloosed from 
those chains which hold captive all the powers of my soul; and 
let the ministry of thy church put the last seal to my resurrec- 
tion and my deliverance. 

And behold, my brethren, the last mean held out in our gos- 
pel. Immediately, on the removal of the stone, our Saviour 
cries, with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth ! Lazarus comes 
forth, still bound hand and foot, and Jesus Christ remits him to 
his disciples to be unloosed. 

Observe here that Jesus Christ doth not order his disciples 
to unloose Lazarus till after he had entirely quitted the tomb. 
We must manifest ourselves to the church, says a holy father, 
before we can, through its ministry, receive the blessing of our 
deliverance. Lazarus, come forth! that is to say, continues 
that father, how long wilt thou remain concealed and buried in- 
wardly in thy conscience? How long wilt thou conceal thine ini- 
quity within thy breast? 

You undoubtedly are not ignorant, my brethen, that remis- 
sion of our sins is only granted through the ministry of the 
church, and that it is necessary to lay open and to present our 
bonds to the piety of the ministers, who alone have authority to 
bind and to unbind on the earth; this is not upon what you require 
instruction. But, I say, that, in order that the conversion be 
solid and durable, we must, like Lazarus, show ourselves quite out 
of the tomb. An ordinary confession is not the matter in question ; 
a hardened sinner ought to go back even to his infancy; even 
to the birth of his passions, even to the youngest periods of his 
life, which have been the commencement of his crimes. Neither 
doubts nor obscurities must longer be left in the conscience, nor 
mists over the youthful manners, under pretence that they have 
already been revealed; a general manifestation is required, and 
whatever may hitherto have been done must be reckoned as no- 
thing; every duty of religion, performed during a disorderly and 



Serm. XXIX.] OF LAZARUS. 



523 



worldly life, is even to be ranked among our crimes; the conscience 
must be considered as a chaos, into which no light has^, as yet, 
penetrated, and over which all our fictitious and past penitence 
has spread only additional darkness. 

For, alas ! my brethren, a contrite soul, after returning from 
the errors of the world and the passions, ought to presume that, 
having to that period lived in criminal habits and propensities, 
every time the sacrament has been received in that state was 
only a profanation and a crime. 

In the first place, Because, having never felt real contrition 
for his errors, nor, consequently, any sincere desire to purge 
himself of them, the remedies of the church, far from having 
purified, have only completed his foulness, and rendered his dis- 
ease more incurable. 

2dly, Because he has never been known to himself; and, con- 
sequently, could never make himself known to the tribunal of 
his conscience. For, alas! the world, in the midst of which 
this soul has always lived, and in which he has ever thought and 
judged like it; the world, I say, finding reasonable and wise 
only its own maxims and manner of thinking, does it sufficient- 
ly know the holiness of the gospel, the obligations of faith, and 
the extent of duties, to be qualified to enter into the detail of 
those transgressions which faith condemns? 

3dly, and lastly Because that, even admitting he should have 
known all his wretchedness, never having had any real sorrow 
for it, he has never been qualified to make it known; for no- 
thing but heartfelt sorrow can explain itself as it ought, or truly 
represent those evils which it feels and abhors; it must be a 
feeling heart that can make itself to be understood on the wounds 
and the sufferings of a heart itself. A sinner full of a profane 
passion expresses it much more eloquently, and with more ani- 
mation: nothing is left unsaid of the foolish and deplorable suf- 
ferings he endures; he enters into all the windings of his heart, 
his jealousies, his fears, and his hopes. As the mind of man, 
says the apostle, alone knows what passes in man, so likewise it 
is only the heart which can know what passes in the heart. 
Contrition gives eyes to see, and words to express every thing; 
it has a language which nothing can counterfeit: thus, in vain 
may a worldly soul, still chained by the heart to all his disorders, 
come to accuse himself, he cannot be understood. Without any 
absolute intention of concealing his wounds, he never exposes 
all their horror, because he neither feels nor is struck with them 
himself; his words always relish of the insensibility of his heart; 
and it is impossible that he should expose, in all their ugliness, 
deformities which he knows not, and which he still loves: he 
ought, therefore, to consider the whole period of his past life as 
a period of darkness and blindness, during which he has neA r er 
viewed himself but with the eyes of flesh and blood; never judg- 



524 



ON THE RESURRECTION [Serm. XXIX. 



ed but through the opinions of passion and self-love; never ac- 
cused but in the language of error and impenitence; never ex- 
hibited himself but in a false aud imperfect light. It is not 
enough to have removed the stone from the tomb; the criminal 
soul must come forth from it himself, that he may exhibit him- 
self, as I may say> in open day; that he may manifest his whole 
life; and that, from his earliest years even to the blessed hour 
of his deliverance, nothing be concealed from the eyes of the 
ministers ready to unbind him. 

But this step, you say, has difficulties which may be the oc- 
casion of casting trouble, embarrassment, and discouragement 
through the conscience, and of suspending the resolution of a 
change of life. What ! my brethren, you involve yourselves in 
discussions so arduous and so endless, for the purpose of clear- 
ing up your temporal concerns; and, in order to establish re- 
gularity and serenity in your conscience, and to leave nothing 
doubtful in the affair of your eternity, you would cry out from 
the moment that a few cares and investigations are required? 
How often do you proclaim, when a decisive step is in agitation 
which may determine the ruin or preservation of your fortune, 
that nothing must be neglected, nothing must be left to chance; 
that one's own eyes must look into every thing; that every thing 
must be cleared up, every thing fathomed even to the bottom, 
that you may have nothing afterwards wherewith to reproach 
yourselves; and this maxim, so reasonable when connected with 
fleeting and frivolous interests, should be less so when applied 
to the grand and only real interest, that of salvation? 

Ah! my brethren, how poor are we in faith ! And what have 
we, in this life, of more importance than the care of arranging 
that awful account which we have to render to the eternal Judge, 
and to the searcher of hearts and of thoughts? That is to say, 
the care of regulating our conscience, of dispelling its darkness, 
of purifying its stains, of clearing up its eternal interests, of con- 
firming its hopes, of strengthening ourselves as much as the 
present condition permits, and making ourselves acquainted, as 
far as in our power, with its situation and its dispositions; and 
not to make our appearance before God like fools, unknown to 
ourselves, uncertain of what we are, and of what we must for 
ever be. Such are the means of conversion marked out to us 
in the miracle of raising up Lazarus: let us conclude the his- 
tory of our gospel, and see what the motives are which deter- 
mine Jesus Christ to operate it. 

Reflection III. To enter at once into our subject, without 
losing sight of the consequence of the gospel; the first motive 
which our Saviour seems to have, in the resurrection of Lazarus, 
is that of drying up the tears, and rewarding the prayers and 
the piety of his sisters. Lord, said they to him, he whom thou 



Serm. XXIX.] OF LAZARUS. 



525 



lovest is sick : and behold the first motive which often determines 
Jesus Christ to operate the conversion of a great sinner; the 
tears and the prayers of those just souls who intreat it. 

Yes, my brethren, whether it be that the Lord thereby wish 
to render virtue more respectable to sinners, by according favours 
to them only through the mediation of just souls; whether it 
be that he intend more closely to knit together his members, 
and to perfect them in unity and in charity, by rendering the 
ministry of the one useful and requisite to the other; it is cer- 
tain that it is through the prayers of the good, and in their in- 
tercession, that the source of the conversion of the greatest sin- 
ners springs up. As all is done for the just in the church, says 
the apostle, so it may be said that every thing is done through 
them; and, as sinners are only endured in it to exercise their 
virtue, or to animate their vigilance, they are also recalled from 
their errors only to console their faith, and to reward their 
groanings and prayers. 

To love just souls is a beginning, then, of righteousness to the 
greatest sinners: it is a presage of virtue to respect it in those 
who practise it; it is a prospect of conversion to seek the socie- 
ty of the good, to esteem their acquaintance, and to interest them 
in our salvation; and, even admitting that our heart still groan 
under iniquitous bonds, and that attachment to the world and to 
pleasures still separate us from God, yet, from the moment that 
we begin to love his servants, we accomplish, as it were, the 
first step in his service. It seems as if our heart already be- 
come tired of its passions, from the moment that we take pleas- 
ure in the society of those who condemn them; and that a re- 
lish for virtue is on the eve of springing up in us from the mo- 
ment that we take delight in those whom virtue alone renders 
amiable. 

Besides, the just, instructed by ourselves with regard to our 
weaknesses, keep them continually present before the Lord: 
they lament, before him, over those chains which still bind us 
to the world and to its amusements; they offer up to him some 
weak desires of virtue, which we have intrusted to their charge 
in order to induce his goodnes to grant more fervent and more 
efficacious ones; they carry, even to the foot of the throne some 
feeble essays towards good which they have noted in us, in or- 
der to obtain for us the perfection and plenitude of his mercy. 
More affected with our evils than for their own wants, they 
piously forget themselves, in order to snatch from destruction 
their brethren who are on the point of perishing before their 
eyes : they alone love us for ourselves, because they alone love 
in us but our salvation: the world may furnish sycophants, 
flatterers, social companions in dissipation, but virtue alone 
gives us friends. 

And it is here that you who now listen to me, who perhaps 
like Mary, were formerly slaves of the world and the passions, 



526 



ON THE RESURRECTION [Serm. XXIX. 



and who, latterly, touched with grace, like her quit no more the 
feet of the Lord; it is here that you ought to remember that, in 
future, one of the most important duties of your new life is, 
that of continually demanding, like the sister of Lazarus, from 
Jesus Christ, the resurrection of your brethren, the conversion 
of those unfortunate souls who have been accomplices in your 
criminal pleasures, and who still under the dominion of death 
and sin, sorrilly drag on their chains in the ways of the world 
and of error. You ought continually, in the bitterness of your 
heart, to be saying to Jesus Christ, like the sister of Lazarus: 
Lord, he whom thou lovest is sick: those souls to whom I have 
been a stumbling block, and who have less offended thee than I, 
are still, however, in the shadow of death and in the corruption 
of sin; and I enjoy a deliverance of which I was more unwor- 
thy than they! Ah! Lord, the delight I feel in appertaining 
to thee shall never be perfect while I behold my brethren thus 
miserably perishing before mine eyes: I shall but imperfectly 
enjoy the fruit of thy mercies, while thou refusest them to souls 
to whom I have myself been the fatal cause of their departure 
from righteousness: and I shall never think that my crimes are 
fully forgiven, while I see them existing in those sinners who 
have been removed from thee only through my example and my 
passions. 

Not, my brethren that you ought to place your whole depen- 
dence on the prayers of the good, or to expect from them alone 
a change of heart and the gift of penitence. For this is a very 
general illusion, and more especially among those who are high 
in the world: they suppose that, by respecting virtue, by show- 
ing favour to the good, and by interesting them to solicit our 
conversion from God, our chains shall drop off of themselves with- 
out any effort on our part; they comfort themselves upon that 
remainder of faith and religion which renders virtue in others 
still dear and respectable to us; they give themselves credit for 
not having, as yet, reached that point of free-thinking and im- 
piety, so common in the world, which makes virtue the public 
butt of its censures and derision. But, alas ! my brethren, it 
availed nothing to King Jehu that he had publicly rendered ho- 
nour to the holy man Jehonadab; his vices still subsisted with 
all that respect he had for the man of God. It availed nothing 
to Herod that he had honoured the piety of John the Baptist, 
and that he had even loved the holy freedom of his discourses: 
the deference which he had for the precursor left him still all 
the excess of his criminal passion. The honours which we pay 
to virtue attract aids to our weakness; but they do not justify 
our errors: the prayers of the good induce the Lord to pay 
more attention to our wants; but they do not render him more 
indulgent to our crimes : they obtain for us victory over the pas- 
sions which we begin to detest; but not over those which we 
still love and which we still continue to cherish: in a word, they 



Serm. XXIX. j 



OF LAZARUS. 



527 



assist our good desires; but they do not authorize our impeni- 
tence. 

The miracle of raising up Lazarus teaches just souls, then, to 
solicit the conversion of their brethren; but the conversion and 
deliverance of their brethren likewise serve to animate their 
lukewarmness and slothfulness. Second motive which Jesus 
Christ proposes: he wishes, by the novelty of that prodigy, to 
arouse the faith of his disciples, still dormant and languishing. 

And such is the fruit which Jesus Christ continually expects 
from the miracles of his grace: he operates before your eyes, 
you who have long walked in his ways, sudden and surprising 
conversions, in order, by the fervour and the zeal of these newly 
risen from the dead, to confound your lukewarmness and indo- 
lence. Yes, my brethren, nothing is more calculated to cover us 
with confusion, and to make us tremble over the infidelities 
which we still mingle with a cold and languishing piety, than 
the sight of a soul buried, but an instant ago, in the corruption 
of death and sin, and whose errors had perhaps inflated the van- 
ity of our zeal, and served as a butt to the malignity of our cen- 
sures; than the sight, I say, of such a soul, vivified, a moment 
after, by grace, freed from his chains, and boldly walking in the 
ways of God, more eager after mortification than formerly after 
pleasure; more removed from the world and its amusements 
than apparently he was once attached; scrupling to himself the 
most innocent recreations; allowing almost no bounds to the 
vivacity and transports of his penitence; and every day making 
rapid advances in piety: while we, after many years of piety, 
alas! still languish on the beginning of that holy career; while 
we, after so many signal favours received, after so many truths 
known, after so many sacraments and other duties of religion 
attended, alas ! we still hold to the world and to ourselves by a 
thousand ties; we are yet but in the first rudiments of faith and 
of a Christian life, and still more distant than at first from that 
zeal and that fervour which constitute the whole value and the 
whole security of a faithful piety. 

My brethren, the dreadful prophecy of Jesus Christ is every 
day fulfilled before our eyes. Publicans and sinners, persons of 
a scandalous conduct according even to the world, and as dis- 
tant from the kingdom of God as the east is from the west, are 
converted, repent, surprise the world with the sight of a retired 
and mortified life, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, 
and Jacob; and, perhaps, we who are looked upon as children 
of the kingdom, — we, whose manners present nothing to the eyes 
of the world but what is orderly and laudable ; we, who are held 
out as models of propriety and piety; we, whom the world ca- 
nonizes, and which we glorified with the reputation and the ap- 
pearances of piety: alas! we shall perhaps be rejected and con- 
founded with unbelievers, for having always laboured at our sal- 



528 



ON THE RESURRECTION [Serm. XXIX. 



vation with negligence, and having preserved a heart still alto- 
gether worldly, in the midst even of oar pious works. 

Thus, my brethren, you whom this discourse regards, do not 
judge of yourselves from the comparison which you inwardly 
make with those souls whom the world and the passions hurry 
away. We may be more righteous than the world, and yet not 
enough so for Jesus Christ: for the world is so corrupted, the 
gospel is so little known in it, faith is so weakened, the law and 
truth so little observed, that what is virtue, with regard to it, 
may still be a great iniquity in the sight of God. 

Rather compare yourselves with those holy penitents who 
formerly edified the church by the prodigy of their austerities, 
and whose life, even at this day, appears to us so incredible; 
with those noble martyrs who gave up their body for the truth, 
and who, amidst the most cruel torments, were transported with 
joy. in contemplating the holy promises; with those primitive 
believers who suffered death every day for Jesus Christ, and 
who, under persecution, loss of property, and of their children, 
thought themselves still possessed of all, as they had neither lost 
faith nor the hope of a better life : behold the models by whom 
you ought to measure your piety, to find it still deficient, and 
all worldly. Unless you resemble them, in vain do you not re- 
semble the world; you shall perish like it; it is not enough that 
you do not imitate the crimes of the worldly, you must also 
have the virtues of the just. 

Lastly, Not only the goodness of Jesus Christ wishes, in this 
miracle, to furnish to his disciples and to the Jewish believers 
a fresh motive for believing in him, but in it his justice likewise 
supplies a fresh occasion of obstinacy and incredulity to the un- 
believing Israelites : last circumstance of our gospel. They take 
measures to destroy him; they wish to put Lazarus himself to 
death, that so striking a testimony of the power of J esus Christ 
may no longer continue among them. They had wept his 
death; scarcely is he called to life when he appears worthy 
only of their fury and vengeance. And behold the sole fruit 
which the generality of you commonly reap from the miracles 
of grace : that is to say, from the conversion and the spiritual 
resurrection of great sinners. Before that the mercy of Jesus 
Christ had cast looks of grace and salvation upon a criminal 
soul, and, while delivered up to the dominion of the passions, 
he was not only dead in sin, but spread everywhere around the 
infection and the stench of his disorders and scandals, you 
seemed touched for his errors and shame; you deplored the 
misery of his lot; you mingled your tears and regrets with the 
tears and regrets of his friends and relatives; and the public 
irregularity of his conduct experienced from you every sorrow 
and compassion of humanity; but, scarcely hath the grace of 
Jesus Christ recalled him to life, scarcely come forth from the 



Serm. XXIX.] OF LAZARUS. 



529 



tomb and that abyss of corruption in which he was buried, does 
he render glory to his deliverer by the holy ardours of a tender 
and sincere piety, than you become the censurers even of his 
piety: you had appeared touched for the excess of his vices, 
and you publicly deride the excess of his pretended piety. You 
had blamed his warm pursuits after pleasure, and you condemn 
the fervour of his love for God. Be consistent, therefore, with 
yourselves, and decide in favour either of the just or of the 
sinner. 

Yes, my brethren, if the happiness of a soul, who, before your 
eyes, returns from his errors, excite not your envy; if the con- 
trition of a sinner, who was formerly the companion perhaps 
of your pleasures and excesses, leave you all your indifference 
with regard to salvation, ah ! insult not at least his good for- 
tune; despise not in him the gift of God; take not, even from 
the miracles of grace, so proper to open your eyes, a fresh mo- 
tive of blindness and unbelief; and do not thus change the 
blessings of God to your brethren, into a dreadful judgment of 
justice against you. 

In reading the history of our gospel, you are sometimes asto- 
nished that the obstinacy and blindness of the Jews should be 
able to resist the most striking miracles of Jesus Christ; you 
do not comprehend how the raising up of the dead, the curing 
of persons born blind, and so many other wonders wrought be- 
fore their eyes, did not force them to acknowledge the truth of 
his ministry and the sanctity of his doctrine: you say that much 
less would convince you; that any one of all these miracles 
would suffice, and that you would immediately yield to the 
truth. 

But, my brethren, you condemn yourselves out of your own 
mouth; for, (without refuting here that absurd manner of 
speaking, by those grand and sublime proofs which religion fur- 
nishes against impiety, and which we have elsewhere employed,) 
candidly, is it not a more arduous and more astonishing miracle 
that a soul, delivered up to sin, and to the most shameful pas- 
sions, — born with every propensity to voluptuousness, pride, re- 
venge, and ambition, and more distant than any one, by the 
nature of his heart, from the kingdom of God, and from all the 
maxims of Christian piety; that, all at once, that soul should 
renounce all his gratifications, break asunder all his warmest 
attachments, repress his liveliest passions, change his most rooted 
inclinations, forget injuries, attention to the body and to for- 
tune; no longer have a relish but for prayer, retirement, the 
practice of the most gloomy and repulsive duties, and hold out 
to the eyes of the public, in a change, in a resurrection so pal- 
pable, the spectacle of a life so different from the former, that 
the world, that freethinking itself, shall be forced to render glory 
to the truth of his change, and that they shall no longer know 

LI 



530 



ON THE RESURRECTION [Sum. XXIX. 



him to be the same; is it not, I say, a more arduous and more 
astonishing miracle? 

Now, doth not the mercy of Jesus Christ operate such miracles 
almost every day before your eyes? Doth not his holy word, 
though in a weak and languishing mouth, still raise up, every day, 
new Lazaruses from the dead? You behold them; you know and 
you appear astonished at them; yet, nevertheless, do they touch 
you? Do these wonders which, with so much majesty, the 
finger of God maketh to shine forth, recal you to truth and to 
the light? Do these changes, a thousand times more miraculous 
than the raising up of the dead, convince you? Do they bring 
you nearer to Jesus Christ, or restore to you that faith which 
you have lost? 

Alas ! your whole care, like the Jews, is to stand out against 
or to weaken their truth. You deny that grace hath any part 
in the glory of those wonders; you seek to trac their motives 
in causes altogether worldly; you consider them as delusions 
and impositions; you attribute to the artifices of man the most 
shining operations of the Holy Spirit; you insist that such a 
new life is only a fresh snare to entrap the public credulity, and 
a new path more securely to attain some worldly purpose. Thus, 
the works of the almighty power of Jesus Christ harden you; 
thus, even the wonders of his grace complete your blindness; 
thus, you make every thing conducive towards your destruc- 
tion: Jesus Christ becomes to you a stumbling-block, when he 
ought to have been a source of life and salvation. The exam- 
ples of sinners stain and corrupt you: their penitence revolts 
and hardens you. 

Great God! suffer then, in order that a life altogether cri- 
minal at last be terminated, that I now raise my voice to thee 
out of the depths in which I have, for so many years, languish- 
ed: the impure chains with which I am bound, attach me, by 
so many folds, to the bottom of the gulf on which I drag on my 
gloomy days, that, in spite of all my good desires, I still remain 
fettered, and almost incapable of any effort towards disengaging 
myself and returning to thee, O my God, whom I have for- 
saken. But, Lord, out of the depths even in which thou seest 
me, like another Lazarus, fettered and buried, I have, at least, 
the voice of the heart free to send up, even to the foot of the 
throne, my sorrows, my lamentations, and my tears, 

The voice of a repentant sinner, is always agreeable, O Lord, 
to thine ear; it is that voice of Jacob which awakens all thy 
tenderness, even when it offers to thy sight but hands of Esau, 
and still covered with blood and crimes. 

Ah! thine holy ears, O Lord, have now sufficiently been 
turned away from my licentious and blasphemous words; let 
them now be attentive to the voice of my supplications; and 
let the singularity of the words which I now address to thee, O 
my God \ attract a more favourable attention to my prayer. 



Serm. XXIX.] OF LAZARUS. 



531 



I come not here, great God! to excuse my disorders in thy 
sight, by alleging to thee the occasions which have seduced me, 
the examples which have led me astray, the misfortune of my 
engagements, and the nature of my heart and of my weakness; 
cover thine eyes, O Lord, upon the horrors of my past life; the 
only possibility of excusing them is, not to behold or to know 
them: alas! if I am unable myself to support even their view; 
if my crimes dread and fly from mine own eyes, and if my ter- 
rors and my weakness render it absolutely necessary to turn my 
sight from them, how, O Lord, should they be able to sustain 
the sanctity of thy looks, if thou search into them with that 
eye of severity which finds stains in the purest and most laud- 
able life? 

But, thou, O Lord, art not a God like unto man, to whom it 
is always as difficult to pardon and to forget the injuries of an 
enemy: goodness and mercy dwell in thine eternal bosom; cle- 
mency is the first attribute of thy supreme Being; and thou 
hast no enemies but those who refuse to place their trust in the 
abundant riches of thy mercy. 

Yes, Lord! be the hour what it may when a criminal soul 
casts itself upon thy mercy; whether in the morning of life 
or in the decline of age; whether after the errors of youthful 
manners or after an entire life of dissipation and licentiousness, 
thou wouldest, O my God! that their hope in thee be. not extin- 
guished; and thou assurest us that the highest point of our 
crimes is but the lowest degree of thy mercy. 

But, likewise, great God! if thou listen to my desires; if, 
once more, thou restore to me that life and that light which I 
have lost; if thou break asunder my chains of death which still 
fetter me; if thou stretch out thine hand to withdraw me from 
the gulf in which I am plunged, ah! never, O Lord, shall I 
cease to proclaim thine eternal mercies: I will forget the whole 
world, that I may be occupied only with the wonders of thy 
grace towards my soul: I will every moment of my life render 
glory to the God who shall have delivered me : my mouth, for 
ever shut against vain things, shall with difficulty be able to 
express all the transports of my love and of my gratitude; and 
thy creature, who still groans under the dominion of the woi*ld 
and of sin, then restored to his true Lord, shall, henceforth and 
for evermore, bless his deliverer. 



/ 



532 



X)N THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. [Serm. XXX. 



SERMON XXX. 
ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. 

Luke xxi. 27. 

Then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud, with power 
and great glory. 

Such will be that last spectacle which shall terminate the 
eternal revolutions which the aspect of this world is continually 
offering to our eyes, and which either amuse us through their 
novelty, or seduce us by their charms. Such will be the coming 
of the Son of Man, the day of his revelation, the accomplish- 
ment of his kingdom, and the complete redemption of his mys- 
tical body. Such the day of the manifestation of consciences, 
that day of misery and despair to one portion of men, and of 
peace, consolation, and ineffable delight to the other: the sweet 
expectation of the just, the dread of the wicked; the day which 
is to determine the destiny of all men. 

It was the image, ever present to their minds, of that terrible 
day which rendered the first believers patient under persecution, 
delighted under sufferance, and illustrious under injury and re- 
proach. It is that which hath since supported the faith of mar- 
tyrs, animated the constancy of virgins, and smoothed to the 
anchorite all the horrors of a desert: it is that which still, at 
this day, peoples those religious solitudes erected, by the piety 
of our ancestors, as asylums against the contagion of the age. 

Even you, my brethren, when the awful solemnity of that 
grand event hath sometimes intruded on your thoughts, have 
been unable to check feelings of compunction and dread. But 
these have been only transitory fears; more smiling and more 
agreeable ideas have speedily effaced them, and recalled to you 
your former calm. Alas ! in the happy days of the church it 
would have been considered as renouncing faith not to have 
longed for the day of the Lord. The only consolation of those 
first disciples of faith was in looking forward to it, and the 
apostles were obliged even to moderate, on that point, the holy 
eagerness of believers; and, at present, the church finds itself 
under the necessity of employing the whole terror of our minis- 
try, in order to recal its remembrance to Christians, and the 
whole fruit of our discourses is confined to making it dreaded. 

I mean not, however, to display to you here the whole history 
of that awful event. I wish to confine myself to one of its cir- 
cumstances, which has always appeared to me as the most pro- 
per to make an impression on the heart: it is the manifestation 
of consciences. 



Serm. XXX.] ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. 533 



Now, behold my whole design. On this earth the sinner 
never knows himself such as he is, and is only half-known to 
men; he lives, in general, unknown to himself, through his 
blindness, and to others, through his dissimulation and cunning. 
In that grand day he will know himself, and will be known. « 
The sinner laid open to himself: the sinner laid open to all 
creatures; behold the subject upon which I have resolved to 
make some simple, and, I trust, edifying reflections. 

Part I. " All things are reserved for a future day," says the 
sage Ecclesiastes, and no man knoweth them here below for all 
things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous 
and to the wicked; to the good, and to the clean and to the un- 
clean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not; 
as is the good so is the sinner." 

What idea, indeed, should we have of Providence in the go- 
vernment of the universe, were we to judge of its wisdom and 
justice only from the diverse lots which it provides on this earth 
for men? What! The good, and the evil should be dispensed 
on the earth, without choice, respect, or discrimination? The just 
man should almost always groan under affliction and want, whilst 
the wicked should live surrounded with glory, pleasures, and afflu- 
ence, and, after fortunes so different, and manners so dissimilar, 
both should alike sink into an eternal oblivion; and that just and 
avenging God, whom they should afterwards meet, would not 
deign either to weigh their deeds, or to distinguish their merits? 
Thou, O Lord, art just, and wilt render to each according to his 
works. 

This grand point of Christian faith, so consistent even with 
natural equity, supposed: I say, that, in that terrible day, when, 
in the face of the universe, the sinner shall appear before that 
awful tribunal accompanied by his works, the manifestation of 
consciences will be the most horrible punishment of the unfaith- 
ful soul. A rigorous examination shall, in the first place, make 
him known to himself: and behold all the circumstances of that 
awful discussion. 

, I ought, in the first place, to make you observe all the titles 
with which he will be invested who shall examine you, and 
which announce all the rigour with which he shall weigh in the 
balance your deeds and thoughts. It will be a rigid legislator, 
jealous of the sanctity of his law, and who will judge you only 
by it; all the softenings, all the vain interpretations, which cus- 
tom or a false knowledge had invented, shall vanish; the lus- 
tre of the law will dissipate them; the resources with which 
they had flattered the sinner, will sink into nothing; and the 
incensed legislator will examine almost more rigorously the false 
interpretations which had changed its puritjr, than the manifest 
transgressions which had violated it. It will be a judge charged 
with the interest of his Father's glory against the sinner, estab- 



534 ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. [Serm. XXX. 



lished to decide betwixt God and man; and that day will be the 
day of his zeal for the honour of the divinity, against those who 
shall not have rendered to him that honour which is his due: a 
Saviour, who will show you his wounds to reproach your ingra- 
titude; all that he hath done for you will rise up against you: 
his blood the price of your salvation, will loudly demand your 
destruction; and his despised kindnesses will be numbered among 
your heaviest crimes: the searcher of hearts, to whose eyes the 
most hidden counsels and the most secret thoughts will all be 
laid open: lastly, a God of terrible majesty, before whom the 
heavens shall dissolve, the elements shall be confounded, and all 
nature overturned; and whose scr unity, with all the terror of 
his presence, the sinner shall singly be forced to support. 

Now, behold the circumstances of that awful examination. 
1st, It will be the same for all men: and, as St Matthew says, 
before him shall be gathered all nations. The difference of ages, 
countries, conditions, birth, and temperament, shall no longer be 
regarded; and as the gospel, on which you will be judged, is 
the law of all times and conditions, and holds out the same rules 
to the prince and to the subject, to the great and to the lowly, to 
the anchorite and to the man immersed in the affairs of the world; 
to the believer who lived in the fervour of the primitive times, 
and to him who hath the misfortune to live in the relaxation of 
the present age; no distinction will be made in the manner of 
proceeding on the examination of the guilty. Vain excuses on 
rank and birth, on the dangers of his station, on the manners of 
his age, on the weakness of temperament, will then be no longer 
listened to from you; and, with respect to modesty, chastity, 
ambition, forgiveness of injuries, renouncement of one's self, mor- 
tification of the senses, the just Judge will demand an exact 
account equally from the Greek as from the Barbarian; from 
the poor as from the powerful ; from the man of the world as from 
the solitary; from the prince as from the humblest subject; lastly, 
from the Christians of these latter times as from the first disciples 
of the gospel. 

Vain judgments of the earth, how shall you then be confound- 
ed ! And how little shall we then estimate nobility of blood, the 
glory of ancestry, the blaze of reputation, the distinction of 
talents, and all those pompous titles with which men endeavour, 
on this earth to puff out their meanness, and to found so many 
vain distinctions and privileges, when we shall see, amidst that 
crowd of guilty? the sovereign confounded with the slave; the 
great with the meanest of the people; the learned promiscuous- 
ly blended with the ignorant and mean; the gods of war, these 
invincible and far-famed characters who had filled the universe 
with their name, at the side of the husbandman and labourer; 
thou alone, O my God! hast glory, power, and immortality; and, 
all the titles of vanity being destroyed and annihilated with the 
world, which had invented them, each will appear before thee 
accompanied solely by his works ! 



Serm. XXX.] ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. 



535 



2dly, That examination will be universal, that is to say, that 
it will comprehend all the different ages and circumstances of 
your life: the weaknesses of childhood, which have escaped your 
remembrance; the transports of youth, of which almost every 
moment has been a crime; the ambition and the anxieties of a 
riper age; the obstinacy and the chagrins of an old age, still 
perhaps voluptuous. What astonishment, when repassing over 
the diverse parts which you have acted on the earth, you shall 
find yourself everywhere profane, dissolute, voluptuous, without 
virtue, without penitence, without good works; having passed 
through a diversity of situations merely in order to amass a more 
abundant treasure of wrath ; and having lived in these diverse 
states as if, to a certainty, all were to die with you ! 

The variety of events, which succeed each other here below, 
and divide our life, fix our attention only on the present, and do 
not permit us to recollect it in the whole, or fully to see what 
we really are. We never regard ourselves but in that point of 
view in which our present situation holds us out ; the last situa- 
tion is always the one which leads us to judge of ourselves; a 
sentiment of salvation, with which God sometimes indulges us, 
calms us on an insensibility of many years; a day, passed in ex- 
ercises of piety, makes us forget a life of crimes; the declara- 
tion of our faults, at the tribunal of penitence, effaces them from 
our remembrance, and they become to us as though they had 
never been; in a word, of all the different states of our con- 
science we never see but the present. Bat, in the presence of 
the terrible Judge, the whole will be visible at once; the history 
will be entirely laid open. From the very first feeling formed 
by your heart, even to its last sigh, all shall be collected before 
your eyes; all the iniquities, dispersed through the different 
stages of your life, will then confront you; not an action, not a 
desire, not a word, not a thought, will there be omitted; for, if 
our hairs be numbered, j udge of our deeds. We shall see spring 
up the whole course of our years, which, though as if annihilat- 
ed to us, yet lived in the eyes of God; and there we shall find, 
not those perishable histories in which our vain actions were to 
be transmitted to posterity; not those flattering recitals of our 
military exploits, of those brilliant events which had filled so 
many volumes, and exhausted so much praise; not those public 
records in which are set down the nobility of our birth, the an- 
tiquity of our origin, the fame of our ancestors, the dignities 
which have rendered them illustrious, the lustre which we have 
added to their name, and all the history, as I may say, of human 
illusion and weakness; that immortality so vaunted, which it 
promised to us, shall be buried in the ruins and in the wrecks 
of the universe; but there we shall see the most shocking and 
exact history of our heart, of our mind, of our imagination; that 
is to say, that internal and invisible part of our life, equally un- 
known to ourselves as to the rest of men. 



536 ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. [Serm. XXX. 



Yes, my brethren v besides the exterior history of our man- 
ners, which will be all recalled, what will most astonish us is, 
the secret history of our heart, which will then be wholly laid 
open to our eyes; of that heart which we have never sounded, 
never known; of that heart which continually eluded our search, 
and, under specious names, disguised from us the shame of its 
passions; of that heart whose elevation, probity, magnanimity, 
disinterestedness, and natural goodness, we have so much vaunt- 
ed; which the public error and adulation had beheld as such, 
and which had occasioned our being exalted above other men. 
So many shameful desires, which were scarcely formed before 
we endeavoured to conceal them from ourselves; so many absurd 
projects of fortune and elevation, sweet delusions, up to which 
our seduced heart continually gave itself; so many secret and 
mean jealousies which were the invisible principle of all our 
conduct, yet, nevertheless, which we dissembled through pride; 
so many criminal dispositions which had, a thousand times, in- 
duced us ardently to wish, that either the pleasures of the senses 
were eternal, or that, at least, they should remain unpunished ! 
so many hatreds and animosities, which, unknown to ourselves, 
had corrupted our heart; so many defiled and vicious intentions, 
with regard to which we were so ingenious in flattering ourselves; 
so many projects of iniquity to which opportunity had alone been 
wanting, and which we reckoned as nothing, because they had 
never departed from the heart: in a word, that vicissitude of 
passions which, in succession, had possession of our heart: be- 
hold what shall all be displayed before our eyes. We shall see, 
says a holy father, come out as from an ambuscade, numberless 
crimes of which we could never believe ourselves capable. We 
shall be shown to ourselves; we shall be made to enter into our 
own heart, where we had never resided: a sudden light shall 
clear up that abyss: that mystery of iniquity shall be revealed: 
and we shall see that which of all we knew least, that was our- 
selves. 

To the examination of the evils we have committed will suc- 
ceed that of the good which we have failed to do. The endless 
omissions of which our life has been full, and for which we had 
never felt even remorse, will be recalled; so many circumstances 
where our character engaged us to render glory to truth, and 
where we have betrayed it through vile motives of interest, or 
mean compliances ; so many opportunities of doing good, pro- 
vided for us by the goodness of God, and which we have almost 
always neglected; so much culpable and voluntary ignorance, 
in consequence of having dreaded the light, and even fled from 
those who could have* instructed us; so many events so calcu- 
lated to Open our eyes, and which have served only to increase 
our blindness; so much good, which, through our talents or our 
example, we might have done, and which we have prevented by 
our vices; so many souls whose innocence might have been 



Serm. XXX.] ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. 537 



preserved by our bounty, and whom we have left to perish by 
refusing to abate from our profusions; so many crimes which 
might haVe been prevented in our inferiors or equals by prudent 
remonstrances and useful advice, and which indolence, mean- 
ness, and perhaps more culpable views, have made us suppress; 
so many days and moments which might have been placed to 
advantage for Heaven, and which we have spent in inutility and 
an unworthy effeminacy. And what in this is more dreadful, is 
that, in our own eyes, that was the most innocent part of our 
life, offering nothing to our remembrance, as we think, but a 
great void. 

What endless regret, then, to the unfaithful soul, to see such 
a list of days sacrificed to inutility, to that world which is no 
more; while a single moment, consecrated to a God faithful to 
his promises, might have merited the felicity of the holy ! To see 
so many meannesses, so many subjections for the sake of riches, 
and a miserable fortune which could last only for a moment; 
while a single self-denial, suffered for the sake of Jesus Christ, 
would have secured to him an immortal crown ! What regret, 
when he now finds that not half the cares and anxieties were 
required for his salvation which he has undergone to accom- 
plish his destruction: and that a single day of that long life, 
wholly devoted to the world, had sufficed for eternity! 

To that examination will succeed, in the fourth place, that of 
mercies which you have abused; so many holy inspirations either 
rejected or only half prosecuted; so many watchful attentions 
of Providence to your soul rendered unavailing; so many truths, 
declared through our ministry, which, in many believers, have 
operated penitence and salvation, but have always been sterile 
in your heart; so many afflictions and disappointments, which 
the Lord had provided for you, in order to recal you to him, 
and of which you have always made so unworthy a use; even 
so many natural gifts which once were blossoms of virtue, and 
which you have turned into agents of vice: ah! if the unpro- 
fitable servant be cast into utter darkness for having only hid- 
den his talent, with what indulgence can you flatter yourself, you 
who have received so many, and who have always employed 
them against the glory of that Master who had intrusted them 
to you? 

Here, indeed, it is that the reckoning will be terrible. Jesus 
Christ will demand from you the price of his blood. You some- 
times complain that God doth not enough for you; that he hath 
brought you into the world weak, and of a temperament of which 
you are not the master; and that he bestoweth not the necessary 
grace to enable you to resist the many opportunities which drag 
you away. Ah ! you will then see that your whole life has been 
a continued abuse of his mercies; you will see that, among so 
many infidel nations which know him not, you have been pri- 
vileged, enlightened, called to faith, nourished in the doctrine 



538 



ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. [Serm. XXX. 



of truth and the virtue of the sacrament, incessantly supported 
by his inspirations and his grace; you will be shocked to see all 
that God hath done for you, and the little that you have done for 
him; and your complaints will quickly be changed into an utter 
confusion, destitute of every resource but in the horrors of your 
own despair. 

Hitherto the just Judge hath examined you only on those crimes 
which are especially your own; but what will it be when he 
shall enter into a reckoning with you on the sins of others, of 
which you have been either the occasion or the cause, and which 
will, consequently, be charged to your account! What a new 
sink! All the souls to whom you have been a subject of scandal 
and ruin will be presented to you; all the souls whom your dis- 
courses, your counsels, your example, your solicitations, your 
immodesties, have precipitated, with yourself, into eternal de- 
struction; all the souls whose weakness you have either sedu- 
ced, or whose innocence you have corrupted, whose faith you 
have perverted, whose virtue you have shaken, whose free-think- 
ing you have authorised, or whose impiety you have strengthen- 
ed by your persuasions, or by the example of your life. Jesus 
Christ, to whom they belonged, and who had purchased them 
with his blood, will demand them at your hands, as a dear heri- 
tage, as a precious conquest, which you have unjustly ravished 
from him; and, if the Lord marketh Cain with the sign of re- 
probation in demanding account from him of the blood of his 
brother, judge with what sign you shall be marked when you 
shall be brought to a reckoning for his soul. 

But this is not all. Were you a public character, and high 
in authority, what abuses authorised ! What iniquities glanced 
over ! What duties sacrificed, either to your own interests or to 
the passions and interests of others ! What respect of persons, 
in opposition to equity and conscience ! What iniquitous under- 
takings counselled ! What wars, perhaps, what confusions, what 
public evils, of which you have either been the author or the in- 
famous agent ! You will see that your ambition or your coun- 
sels have been as the fatal source of an infinity of miseries, of 
the calamities of your age, of those evils which are perpetuated, 
and pass from father to son; and you will be surprised to find 
that your iniquities have survived yourself, and that, even long 
after death, you were still culpable, before God, of an infinity 
of crimes and disorders which took place on the earth. And 
now it is, my brethren, that the danger of public stations shall 
be known, the precipices which surround the throne itself, the 
rocks of authority, and with what reason the gospel denomi- 
nated happy those who live in the obscurity of a private station ; 
with what it was that religion wished to inspire us with so much 
horror at ambition, so much indifference towards the grandeurs 
of the earth, so much contempt for all that is exalted only 



Serm. XXX.] ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. 539 



the eyes of men, and so frequently recommended to us to love 
only what we ought for ever to love. 

But, exempted perhaps from all these vices which we have 
]ust been mentioning, and attached, for a long time past, to the 
duties of a Christian life, you presume that this terrible exami- 
nation will either not regard you, or, at any rate, that you will 
appear there with more confidence than the criminal soul. Un- 
doubtedly, my dear hearer, that will be the day of triumph and 
glory for the just; the day which will justify these pretended 
excesses of retreat, mortification, modesty, and delicacy of con- 
science, which had furnished to the world so many subjects of 
censure and profane derision: the just shall, no doubt, appear 
before that awful tribunal with more confidence than the sinner; 
but he will also appear there, and even his righteousness shall 
be judged: your virtues, your holy works, will be submitted to 
that rigorous examination. The world, which often refuses the 
praises due to the truest virtue, too often likewise grants them 
to the sole appearances of virtue: there are even so many just 
who deceive themselves, and who are indebted, for that name 
and that reputation, merely to the public error. Thus, it is not 
only Tyre and Sidon that I shall visit in the day of my wrath, 
sayeth the Lord; that is to say, those sinners whom their 
crimes seemed to confound with the unbelievers and the inhabi- 
tants of Tyre and Sidon: I shall carry the light of my judg- 
ments even to Jerusalem; that is to say, I will examine, I will 
search into, I will fathom the motives of those holy works which 
seem to equal you with the most faithful of the holy Jerusalem. 

I will trace, even to the source, the motive of that conversion 
which made so much noise in the world; and it shall be seen 
whether I find not its origin in some secret disgust, in the de- 
clension of youth and fortune, in private views of favour and 
preferment, rather than in the detestation of sin and love of 
righteousness. 

I will balance these liberalities poured out on the bosom of 
the poor, those compassionate visits, that zeal for pious under- 
takings, that protection granted to my servants with complai- 
sance, a desire of esteem, ostentation, and worldly views which 
have infected them: and, in my sight, they shall perhaps ap- 
pear to be rather the fruits of pride than the consequences of 
grace and the work of my spirit. 

I will recal that train of prayer and other holy practices of 
which you had made a kind of habit, which no longer roused 
within you any feeling of faith and compunction; and you shall 
know whether lukewarmness, negligence, the little fruit which 
attended them, and the little disposition within you previous to 
them, have not, before me, constituted so many infidelities, for 
which you shall be judged without mercy. 

I will search into that removal from the world and from pleas- 
ures, that singularity of conduct, that affectation of modesty 



540 ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. [Serm. XXX. 



and regularity; and perhaps I shall find them more the conse- 
quence of humour, temperament, and indolence, than of faith ; 
and that, in a life more regular and more retired, in the opin- 
ion of men, you shall still have preserved all your self-love, 
your attachment to the flesh, all the niceties of sensuality; and, 
in a word, all the sins of the most worldly souls. 

I will search, even to the bottom, that pretended zeal for my 
glory which made you so deeply lament over the scandals of 
which you were a spectator, which led you to condemn them 
with such confidence and pride, and to blaze out, with such 
warmth, against the irregularities and weaknesses of your breth- 
ren; and, perhaps, shall that zeal he no longer in my sight but 
a natural severity of temper, a malignity of disposition, an in- 
clination towards censure and upbraiding, an indiscreet warmth, 
a vain, ostentatious zeal; far from finding you full of zeal for my 
glory, and for the salvation of your brethren, you shall no 
longer appear before me, but unjust, obstinate, malicious, and 
rash. 

I will demand an account from you of those splendid talents 
which, it would appear, you employed only for my glory and 
for the instruction of believers; and which had drawn upon 
you the blessings of the just and the acclamations even of the 
worldly; and, perhaps, that continual attention to, and gratifi- 
cation of your own pride, the desire of surpassing others, and 
your sensibility of human applause, will prove the prominent 
features of your works to be only the works of man and the 
fruits of pride; and that I shall curse those labours which had 
sprung from so impure a source. 

Great God! What works, upon which I had so firmly de- 
pended, shall then be found dead in thine eyes ! How terrible 
shall be that discrimination ! And, of all the actions which we 
have performed even for heaven, how few wilt thou acknow- 
ledge as thine, and which thou wilt deem worthy of reward? 

Do not from thence conclude, my brethren, that it is then 
needless to labour for salvation, seeing the jiist Judge shall seek 
only the condemnation of men : Only their condemnation ! My 
brethren, he is come solely to save tbem, and his mercies will 
far surpass even his justice. But behold the conclusion which 
you ought rather to draw. Those righteous souls whom you so 
frequently accuse of excess, of scrupulosity in the practice of 
the duties of a Christian life, as though they carried things too 
far; these souls, exposed to the light of God, shall appear luke- 
warm, sensual, imperfect, and perhaps criminal: and you, who 
live in the dangers and pleasures of the world; you, who devote 
to religion and your salvation only the most idle moments of 
your life; you, who scarcely mingle a single work of piety with 
an entire year of dissipation and inutility, in what situation 
shall you then be, my dear hearer? If those who shall have 
only laudable works to present shall yet be in danger of rejec- 



Serm. XXX.] ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. 



541 



tion, what shall be your destiny? You, who have only a life 
entirely worldly to offer? If the tree full of blossoms be treat- 
ed with such rigour, what shall become of the withered and 
barren tree? And, if the just be even with difficulty saved, — 
I speak not of the sinner, for he is already judged, — but the 
worldly soul, who lives without either vice or virtue, how shall 
he dare to appear? 

You after all say, my dear hearer, that your conscience does 
not reproach you with great crimes; that, if not good, neither 
are you bad, and that your only sin is indolence and sloth. 
Ah ! you shall then know yourself before the tribunal of Jesus 
Christ. You shall see whether the testimony of your conscience, 
which reproached you not with crimes, and left you scarcely 
any thing culpable to confess, were not a terrible blindness, up 
to which the justice of God had always delivered you. From 
the dread in which you shall see the just you shall find what 
ought to be your own fears; and whether the confidence in 
which you have always lived sprung from the peace of a good 
conscience or from the false security of a worldly one. 

O my God! cries St Augustin, could I but see, at this mo- 
ment, the state of my soul as thou shalt then lay it open to me ! 
Could I despoil myself of those prejudices which blind me; 
mistrust those examples which confirm me; those customs 
which quiet me; those talents which dazzle me; those praises 
which seduce me; that rank and those titles which deceive me; 
and those complaisances of a sacred guide, which form all my 
security; could I but despoil myself of that self-love which is 
the source of all my errors, and behold myself alone at thy feet, 
in thy light: O my God! what horror would I not feel for 
myself? And what measures would I not take, in humbling 
myself before thee, to prevent the public shame of that awful 
day, when the counsels of hearts, and the secrecy of thoughts, 
shall be manifested? For, my brethren, not only shall the sin- 
ner be shown to himself, but he shall likewise be shown to all 
creatures. 

Part II. That mixture of good and wicked, inevitable on 
this earth, gives birth to two disorders. In the first place, 
through favour of that mixture, concealed vice escapes that pub- 
lic ignominy which is its due: virtue, not known, receives not 
the applause it merits. In the second place, the sinner, high 
in honours, frequently fills the most distinguished offices, while 
the good and pious man lives in humiliation, and crawls like a 
slave at his feet. Now, on that terrible day, a double manifest- 
ation shall be made, which will repair that twofold disorder. 
In the first place, the sinful will be marked out from the just 
by the public exposition of their conscience. In the second 
place, they will be discerned by a separation from them, and the 
difference of their stations before the throne of glory. 



542 QN THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. [Sebm. XXX. 



In order fully to comprehend all the shame and confusion 
with which the criminal soul shall then he covered, when shown 
to all creatures, and all his vices, the most secret, exposed to 
the light, it requires only to pay attention, 1st, To the number 
and character of the spectators who shall witness his shame; 
2dly, To the care he had taken to conceal his weaknesses and 
debaucheries from the eyes of men, while on the earth; 3c?/?/, 
and lastly, To his personal qualities, which will render his con- 
fusion still more deep and overwhelming. 

Here figure to yourselves, then, my brethren, the criminal 
soul before the tribunal of Christ, surrounded by angels and men; 
the just, the sinful, his relations, his subjects, his masters, his 
friends, his enemies, all their eyes fixed on him; present at the 
terrible scrutiny which the just Judge will make into his ac- 
tions, his desires, and his thoughts; forced, in spite of them- 
selves, to assist at his judgment, and to witness the justice of 
the sentence which the Son of Man shall pronounce against him. 
All the resources which, on this earth, might soften the most 
humiliating confusion, shall fail, on that day, to the unfaithful 
soul. 

First resource. On this earth, when guilty of a fault which 
has sunk us into contempt, the whole has turned on a certain 
number of witnesses confined to our nation, or to the place of 
our birth; we may have removed ourselves from them, in the 
course of time, to avoid continually reading, in their eyes, the 
remembrance and reproach of our past shame; we may have 
changed our place of dwelling to go elsewhere among strangers, 
to recover a reputation which we had already lost. But, on 4:hat 
grand day, all men assembled shall be acquainted with the se- 
cret history of your manners and of your conscience: you shall 
no longer have it in your power to go to hide yourself far from 
the looks of the spectators, to seek new countries, and, like 
Cain, to fly into the desert. Each shall be fixed immoveable in 
the place marked our for him, bearing on his forehead the sen- 
tence of his condemnation and the history of his whole life, 
obliged to sustain the eyes of the universe and the whole shame 
of his weaknesses. There shall no longer, then, be any hidden 
spot wherein to conceal himself from the public regard; the 
light of God, the sole glory of the Son of Man, will fill the 
heavens and the earth; and, in all that immensity of space 
around you, you will, in every part, discover from afar only 
watchful eyes fixed on you. 

Second resource. On the earth, when our shame is even 
public, and when degraded in the minds of men, in consequence 
of some striking fault, yet there are always some friends ground- 
ed in our favour, whose esteem and society recompense us, in 
some measure, for the public contempt, and whose kindness as- 
sists us in sustaining the inveteracy of the general censure. But 
on this occasion, the presence of our friends will be the object 



Serm. XXX.] ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. 



543 



by far the most insupportable to our shame. If sinners, like 
ourselves, they will cast up to us our common pleas ures and our 
example, which, perhaps, have been the first rock upon which 
their innocence split: if just, as they had believed us to be 
children of light, ah ! they will reproach to us their good opi- 
nion abused and their friendship seduced. You loved the just, 
shall they say to us, and you hated righteousness; you protected 
virtue, yet, in your heart, you placed vice on the throne: in us 
you sought that probity, that fidelity, and that security which 
you found not in your worldly friends, but you sought not the 
Lord who formed all these virtues in our heart; ah! did not the 
author of all our gifts deserve to be more loved, more sought 
after than we ! 

And behold the third resource, which shall fail, to the con- 
fusion of the criminal soul. For, should no friends be found on 
this earth to interest themselves in our misfortunes, there are 
always, at least, indifferent persons whom our faults do not 
wound or excite against us. But, on that terrible day, we shall 
have no indifferent spectators. The just, so feeling on this 
earth to the calamities of their brethren, so ingenious in excus- 
ing their faults, and so ready in covering them with the veil of 
charity, in order, at least, to soften, if they cannot find an ap- 
parent excuse for them in the eyes of men; the just, then, de- 
spoiled, like the Son of Man, of that indulgence and pity which 
they had exercised towards their brethren on the earth, shall 
hiss at the sinner, says the prophet, shall insult him, and shall 
demand his punishment from the Lord to avenge his glory; 
they shall enter into the zeal and the interests of his justice; 
and, becoming judges themselves, they shall mock him, says 
the prophet, and say, " Lo, this is the man that made not God 
his strength; but trusted in the abundance of his riches, and 
strengthened himself in his wickedness. Behold, now, that 
foolish man, who believed himself the only sage on the earth, 
and who considered the life of the just as a folly; who made to 
himself, in the favour of the great, in the vanity of titles and 
dignities, in the extent of his lands and possessions, in the good 
opinion and applauses of men, supports of dirt, which were to 
perish with him. Where, now, are your gods, your rock in 
whom you trusted; Let them rise up and help you, and be your 
protection." 

Nor shall sinners be more indulgent to his misery; they will 
feel for him all that horror which they shall be forced to feel for 
themselves; the fellowship of misfortune, which ought to unite, 
will be only an eternal hatred which shall divide them; only a 
cruel inveteracy, which shall fill their hearts with nothing but 
sentiments of cruelty and fury against their brethren; and they 
will hate in others the same crimes from which all their miseries 
spring. In a word, the men most distant from us, the most 
savage nations to whom the name of Jesus Christ hath never 



544 ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. [Serm. XXX. 



been announced, come then, but too late, to the knowledge of 
truth, shall rise up against you, and reproach to you, that, if the 
miracles which God had in vain operated amongst you had been 
wrought before their eyes; that if they, like you, had been en- 
lightened by the gospel, and sustained by the succours of faith, 
they would have done penance in sackcloth and ashes, and put 
to advantage, for their salvation, those favours which you have 
abused for your destruction. 

Such shall be the confusion of the reprobate soul. Accursed 
before God, he will find himself at the same time the outcast of 
heaven and of earth, the shame and curse of all creatures : even 
the inanimate, which he had forced to be subservient to his pas- 
sions, and which groaned, says St. Paul, in the expectation of 
deliverance from that shameful servitude, shall, in their way, 
rise up against him. The sun, of which he had abused the 
light, shall be darkened, as if it were not to shine on his crimes: 
the stars shall disappear, as if to tell him that they have too 
long witnessed his iniquitous passions: the earth shall crumble 
from under his feet, as if to eject from its bosom a monster 
which it could no longer bear: and the whole universe, says 
Solomon, shall arm against him to avenge the glory of the Lord 
whom he has insulted. Alas ! we so dearly love to be lamented 
in our misfortunes: indifference alone irritates and wounds us: 
here, not only shall all hearts be shut to our misfortunes, but all 
beholders shall insult our shame, and the only portion left to 
the sinner shall be his confusion, his despair, and his crimes. 
First circumstance of the confusion of the criminal soul, namely, 
the multitude of witnesses. 

I take the second from the care and anxiety they had taken, 
whilst living on the earth, to disguise and conceal themselves 
from the eyes of men. For, my brethren, the world is a grand 
theatre, on which almost every one acts a borrowed part. As 
we are full of passions, and as all passions have always in them 
something mean and despicable, our whole attention is employ- 
ed in concealing their meanness, and in endeavouring to give 
ourselves out for what we are not: iniquity is always treacher- 
ous and deceitful. Thus, your whole life, you, above all, who 
listen to me, and who considered the duplicity of your charac- 
ter as knowledge of the world and of the court; your whole 
life has been only one train of dissimulation and artifice; even 
your sincerest and most intimate friends have only in part 
known you; you were beyond the reach of the world, for you 
changed character, sentiment, and inclination, according to cir- 
cumstances and the disposition of those to whom you wished to 
make yourselves agreeable. Through these means you had ac- 
quired the reputation of ability and wisdom; but there shall be 
seen, in its native colours, a mean and treacherous soul, desti- 
tute of probity and truth, and whose principal virtue had been 
the concealment of its baseness and meanness. 



Serm. XXX.] ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. 545 



You, likewise, unfaithful soul, whom a sex more jealous of hon- 
our had rendered still more attentive to conceal your weaknesses 
from the eyes of men, you were so artful in saving yourself from 
a discovery you took from so far, and so surely, your measures 
to deceive the eyes of a husband, the vigilance of a mother, and, 
perhaps the probity of a confessor: you would not have surviv- 
ed the accident which had therein betrayed your precautions and 
artifices. Vain cares ! you only covered your lewdnesses, says 
the prophet, with a spider's web, which on that great day, the 
Son of Man shall dissipate with a single blast of his mouth. In 
the presence of all assembled nations, sayeth the Lord, I will 
gather around thee all thy lovers. They shall see that eternal 
train of artifices, disguises and meannesses; that shameful traffic 
of protestations and oaths which you made instrumental to so 
many different passions, and at the same time, to lull their cre- 
dulity: they shall see them, and, tracing even to the source, 
those criminal favours which you had bestowed on them, they 
shall find them not in their pretended merit, as you had wished 
to make them believe, but in your own infamous character, in a 
heart naturally lewd; you, who pique yourselves on having a 
heart so noble, so sincere, and so incapable of being touched but 
by merit alone. And all this shall take place before the eyes of 
the universe; of those friends whom an appearance of regular- 
ity had preserved to you; of your relations who were ignorant 
of the disgrace with which you covered them; of that husband 
who had so much depended on your affection and fidelity. 

O my God! is there an abyss sufficiently profound in the 
earth in which the unfaithful soul would not then wish to hide 
himself! For, in the world, men never but see the outside and 
the scandal of our vices; and, besides, our confusion is shared 
and countenanced by those who are continually culpable of the 
same faults. But, before the tribunal of Jesus Christ, your 
weaknesses shall be seen even in your heart; that is to say, their 
birth, their progress, their most private motives, and a thousand 
shameful and personal circumstances, which, even more than 
the crimes themselves shall cover you with shame: it will be a 
confusion in which none shall bear a share, and, consequently, 
will be entirely your own. 

Lastly, The final circumstance, which shall render the shame 
of the sinner overwhelming, is his personal qualities. 

You passed in the world for a faithful, sincere and generous 
friend: it will be seen that you are vile, perfidious, interested, 
without faith, honour, probity, conscience, or character. You 
gave yourself out for a towering mind, above all the vulgar pre- 
judices; and you shall unfold the most humiliating meannesses 
and circumstances, at which the vilest soul would almost expire 
with shame. In the world you were regarded as a man of in- 
tegrity, and of an approved probity in the administration of your 
charge; that reputation had perhaps attracted fresh honours, 

m m 



546 



ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. [Sebm. XXX. 



and acquired to you the public confidence; you, nevertheless, 
abused the credulity of men; those pompous shows of equity 
concealed an unjust and servile soul, and a thousand times had 
your fidelity been in secret betrayed, and your conscience cor- 
rupted by views of fortune and motives of interest; you were ap- 
parently adorned with sanctity and righteousness; you had al- 
ways assumed the semblance of the just; you were believed to 
be the friend of God and the faithful observer of his law; yet 
your heart was not upright before the Lord: under the cloak of 
religion you covered a defiled conscience and ignominous con- 
cealments; you walked in the way of holy things more securely 
to attain your purposes. Ah ! on that day of revelation, you 
go to undeceive the whole universe; those who had seen you on 
the earth, astonished at your unexpected lot, shall search among 
the reprobate to discover the upright man; the hope of the hy- 
pocrite shall then be overthrown: you unjustly had enjoyed the 
esteem of men; you shall be known and God avenged. Lastly, 
Yet shall I dare to say it, and here reveal the shame of my 
brethren? You were perhaps the dispenser of holy things, high 
in honour in the temple of God; the charge of faith, of doctrine, 
and of piety was intrusted to you; you appeared every day in 
the sanctuary, clothed in the formidable tokens of your dig- 
nity, offering up pure gifts and sacrifices without stain; you 
were intrusted with the secrecies of consciences; you sustained 
the weak in faith; you spoke of wisdom among the instructed; 
and, under all that religion hath most august or most holy, you 
perhaps concealed whatever the earth has most execrable. You 
were an impostor, a man of sin seated in the temple of God; 
you instructed others, and you taught not yourself; you inspir- 
ed horror against idols, and your days were only numbered by 
your sacrileges. Ah ! The mystery of iniquity shall then be re- 
vealed; and you shall at last be known for what you have al- 
ways been, the curse of heaven and the shame of the earth. 

Behold, my brethren, all the confusion with which the cri- 
minal soul shall be overwhelmed. And it will not be a transi- 
tory confusion. In the world we have only the first shame of 
a fault to undergo: the noise of it gradually dies away; new 
adventures at last take place of ours; and the remembrance of 
our disgrace fades away, and disappears with the rumour which 
had published them. But, at the great day, shame shall eter- 
nally remain upon the criminal soul; there shall no longer be 
any fresh events to obliterate his crimes and his confusion; no- 
thing shall more change: all shall be fixed and eternal: that 
which he shall have appeared before the tribunal of Jesus Christ, 
that will he for ever appear: even the nature of his torments 
shall incessantly publish the nature of his crimes; and his 
shame shall every day be renewed in his punishment. My 
brethren, reflections here are needless; and, if some remains of 
faith still exist within you, it is for you to sound your own con- 



Serm. XXX.] ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. 547 



sciences, and from this moment, to adopt such measures as may 
enable you to sustain the manifestation of that great day. 

But, after having shown to you the public confusion with 
which the sinner shall be covered, why may I not expose to you 
here what shall be the glory and the consolation of the truly 
just man, when the secrecies of his conscience shall be laid open 
to the universe; when the whole mystery of his heart shall be 
unfolded; of that heart, of which all the loveliness concealed 
from the eyes of men was known only to God; of that heart in 
which he had always supposed stains and defilements, and of 
which his humility had concealed from himself all the holiness 
and innocency; of that heart in which God alone had always 
dwelt, and which he had taken pleasure in adorning and en- 
riching with his gifts and grace ! What new wonders shall that 
divine sanctuary, hitherto so impenetrable, then offer to the 
eyes of the beholders, when the veil shall be removed from it! 
What fervent desires ! What secret victories ! What heroical 
sacrifices! What pure prayers! What tender lamentations! 
What faith ! What grandeur ! What elevation above all those 
vain objects which form all the desires and hopes of men! Then 
it shall indeed be seen, that nothing was so great, or so worthy 
of admiration in the world, as a truly just man; as those souk 
who were considered as useless, because they were so to our 
passions; and whose obscure and retired life was so much de- 
spised. It shall be seen that the heart of the faithful soul pos- 
sessed more lustre and grandeur than all those great events 
which take place on the earth, was alone worthy of being writ- 
ten down in the eternal books, and offered to the eyes of God a 
sight more worthy of angels and men than all the victories and 
conquests which here below fill the vanity of histories, to which 
pompous monuments are erected in order to eternise their re- 
membrance, and which then shall no longer be considered but 
as puerile squabbles, or the fruit of pride and the human pas- 
sions. First disorder repaired on that great day: vice conceal- 
ed here below from public shame, and virtue from the applauses 
it merits. 

The second disorder, which the mixture of the good and of the 
bad gives birth to in the world, is the inequality of conditions, 
and the unjust exchange of their lots. It is with the present 
age as with the image of which Daniel explained the mystery: 
the just, like the clay which we trample under our feet, or, like 
iron hardened in the fire of tribulation, in general occupy, here 
below, only the meanest and most contemptible stations; while, 
on the contrary, the sinful and the worldly, typified by the gold 
and silver, vain objects of their passions, almost always find 
themselves placed at the head of affairs, and in the most emi- 
nent places. Now, this is a disorder; and, although the good 
be thereby exercised, and the wicked hardened; although this 
confusion of good and evil enter into the order of Providence; 



548 ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. [Serm. XXX. 



and that, by ways and means impenetrable to man, God makes 
use of them to lead the just and the sinner to his purposes, yet 
it is necessary that the Son of Man gather together all things; 
and that it shall at last be discerned between the righteous and 
the wicked; between him that serveth God and him that serv- 
eth him not. Now, behold the grand spectacle of that last 
day: order shall be re-established; the good separated from the 
wicked; the sheep set on his right hand, and the goats on the 
left. 

Separation, 1st, altogether new. It will not be demanded 
from you, in order to determine what rank you ought to hold 
in this awful scene, what were your names, your birth, your ti- 
tles, or your dignities; these were but a vapour, which had no 
reality but in the public illusion; you will be examined only to 
prove whether you be an unclean animal or an innocent sheep: 
the prince shall not be separated from the subject; the noble 
from the peasant; the poor from the powerful; the conqueror 
from the vanquished; but the chaff from the good grain; the 
vessels of honour from the vessels of shame; the goats from the 
sheep. 

The Son of Man shall be seen from on high, casting his re- 
gards over all the mingled nations and people assembled at his 
feet; recalling, in that view, the history of the universe, that is 
to say, of the passions or of the virtues of men ; he shall be seen 
gathering together his chosen from the four quarters; choosing 
them from among every tongue, every station, and every na- 
tion; re-uniting the children of Israel dispersed through the 
universe; unfolding the secret history of a holy and new peo- 
ple; bringing forth to view heroes of faith till then unknown in 
the world; no more distinguishing ages by the victories of con- 
querors, by the establishment or the fall of empires, by the po- 
liteness or the barbarity of the times, by the great characters 
who have blazed in every age, but by the diverse triumphs of 
grace, by the hidden victories of the just over their passions, by 
the establishment of his reign in a heart, by the heroical forti- 
tude of a persecuted believer. You shall see him change the 
face of all things, create a new heaven and a new earth, and re- 
duce that infinite variety of peoples, titles, conditions, and dig- 
nities, to a people holy and a people reprobate, to the goats and 
the sheep. 

Separation, 2dly, cruel. The father shall be separated from 
his child; friend from friend; brother from brother: the one 
shall be taken the other left. Death, which deprives us of the 
dearest friends, and whose loss occasions to us so many sighs 
and tears, leaves us, at least, a consolation in the hope of being 
one day re-united to them. Here, the separation is eternal; no 
hope of re-union shall more exist: we shall no more have rela- 
tives, father, child, friend; no other ties than everlasting 
flames, which shall for ever unite us to the reprobate. 



Serm. XXX.] ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. 649 



Separation, 3dly, ignominious. We are so touchy on a pre- 
ference, when neglected, or left blended with the crowd on any 
splendid occasion; we are so peevish and so irritated, when, in 
the distribution of favours, we see novices carrying off the palm 
and the principal offices; our services forgotten, and those, 
whom we had always seen far below us, now exalted and placed 
over our heads: but, on that grand day, it is that preference 
shall be accompanied with circumstances the most humiliating 
and the most galling to the criminal soul. In that universal si- 
lence, in that dreadful expectation, in which each one shall be 
for the decision of his destiny, you shall see the Son of Man 
advancing in the heavens, with crowns in one hand and the rod 
of wrath in the other, to carry off, from your side, a just soul 
whose innocence you, perhaps, had blackened by rash discourses, 
or whose virtues you had insulted by impious pleasantries; a 
believer who was, perhaps, born your subject; a Lazarus, who, 
in vain, perhaps, had importuned you with the recital of his 
wants and poverty; a rival whom you had always beheld with 
an eye of scorn, and upon whose ruins your intrigues and arti- 
fices had perhaps exalted you. You shall see the Son of Man 
place a crown of immortality on his head, seat him at his right 
hand, while you, like the proud Haman, rejected, humbled, and 
degraded, shall no longer have before your eyes but the prepa- 
ration of your punishment. 

Yes, my brethren, every galling and overwhelming circum- 
stance shall attend that preference. A savage converted to 
faith shall be ranked among the sheep, while a Christian inhe- 
ritor of the promises shall be left among the goats. The lay- 
man shall ascend, like the eagle over its prey, while the minis- 
ter of Jesus Christ shall grovel on the earth, covered with 
shame and reproach. The man of the world shall pass to the 
right hand, while the recluse passes to the left. The wise, the 
learned, the critic of the age, shall be driven to the side of the 
unclean; and the idiot, who knew not how to answer even the 
common salutations, shall be placed on a throne of glory and 
light. Rahab, a sinful woman, shall mount up to the heavenly 
Sion along with the true Israelites; while the sister of Moses, 
and the spouse of Jesus Christ, shall be driven from the camp 
and the tents of Israel, and shall appear covered with a shame- 
ful leprosy. Thou art determined, O my God ! that nothing 
shall be wanting towards the despair of the criminal soul. It is 
not sufficient that he shall be overwhelmed under the weight of 
his own misery; thou shalt create for him a new punishment 
in the felicity of the just, who, preferred to him, shall be seen 
conducted by angels into the bosom of immortality. 

What change of scene, my brethren, in the universe ! It is 
then that, all scandals being plucked out from the kingdom of 
Jesus Christ, and the just wholly separated from the sinful, they 
shall form a holy nation, a chosen race, and the church of first- 



550 ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. [Sekm. XXX. 



born, whose names were written down in heaven. It is then 
that the commerce of the wicked, inevitable on this earth, shall 
no longer occasion their faith to lament, or their innocence to 
tremble. It is then that their lot, no longer connected with the 
unfaithful or the hypocrite, shall no more constrain them to be 
witnesses of their crimes, and sometimes even the involuntary 
agents of their passions. It is then that all the bonds of socie- 
ty, of authority, or dependence, which attached them on this 
earth to the impious and to the worldly, being broken assunder, 
they shall no longer say with the prophet, 6 4 Lord, why length- 
enest thou out here our banishment and our sojourning? How 
long shall the land mourn, and the herbs of every field wither 
for the wickedness of them that dwell therein?" Lastly, Then 
it is that their tears shall be changed into joy, and their sighs 
into thanksgivings; they shall pass to the right hand as the 
sheep, while the left shall be reserved for the goats and the im- 
pious. 

The disposition of the universe thus laid out; all nations of 
the earth thus divided; each one fixed in the place allotted to 
him; surprise, terror, despair, and confusion marked in the 
countenance of one part; on that of the other, joy, serenity, 
and confidence: the eyes of the just raised on high towards the 
Son of Man, from whom they await their deliverance; those of 
the impious frightfully fixed on the earth, and almost piercing 
the abyss with their looks, as if already to mark out the place 
which is destined for them: the King of glory, says the gospel, 
placed in the middle of two nations, shall come forward; and, 
turning towards those who shall be at his right hand, with an 
aspect full of sweetness and majesty, and sufficient of itself to 
console them for all their past sufferings, he will say to them, 
" Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared 
for you from the foundation of the world." The sinful hath al- 
ways considered you as the outcast, and the most useless por- 
tion of the earth; let them now learn that the world itself ex- 
isted only for you, that all was created for you, and that all 
hath finished from the moment that your number was com- 
pleted. Quit, then, an earth where you had always been tra- 
vellers and strangers; follow me into the immortal ways of my 
glory and felicity, as you have followed me in those of my hu- 
miliation and sufferings. Your toils have endured but for an 
instant; the happiness you go to enjoy shall be without end." 

Then, turning to the left hand, vengeance and fury in his 
eyes, here and there casting the most dreadful looks, like aven- 
ging thunderbolts, on that crowd of guilty; with a voice, says a 
prophet, which shall burst open the bowels of the abyss to swal- 
low them up, he shall say, not as upon the cross, " Father, for- 
give them, for they know not what they do," but, " Depart from 
me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and 
his angels. You were the chosen of the earth, you are the 



Serm. XXX.] ON THE DAY OF JUDGMENT. 551 



cursed of my Father; your pleasures have been fleeting and 
transitory, your anguish shall be eternal." The just, then, 
mounting with the Son of Man, shall begin to sing this heaven- 
ly song, Thou art rich in mercy, Lord, and thou hast crowned 
thy gifts in recompensing our good actions. Then shall the 
impious curse the Author of their being and the fatal day 
which brought them forth; or, rather, they shall enter into 
wrath against themselves, as the authors of their misery and 
destruction. The abyss shall open; the heavens shall bow 
down; the reprobate, says the gospel, shall go into everlasting 
punishment, and the just into life eternal. Behold a lot which 
shall change no more. 

After a relation so awful, and so proper to make an impres- 
sion on the most hardened hearts, I cannot conclude, without 
addressing to you the same words which Moses formerly ad- 
dressed to the Israelites after having laid before them the dread- 
ful threatenings, and the soothing promises, contained in the 
Book of the LaAV. " Children of Israel behold I set before you 
this day a blessing and a curse, a blessing, if ye obey the com- 
mandments of the Lord your God which I command you this 
day; and a curse, if ye will not obey the commandments of the 
Lord your God, but turn aside, out of the way which I com- 
mand you this day, to go after other gods which ye have not 
known." 

Behold, my brethren, what I say to you in concluding a sub- 
ject so terrible. It now belongs to you to choose and to declare 
yourselves: the right hand and the left are before you, the 
promises and the threatenings, the blessings and the curses. 
Your destiny turns on this awful alternative: you either shall 
be on the side of Satan and his angels, or you shall be chosen 
with Jesus Christ and his saints. Here there is no middle 
way; I have pointed out the path which leads us to life, and that 
which leads to perdition. In which of these two do you now 
walk? And on which side do you believe that you should find 
yourselves, were you, at this moment, to appear before the aw- 
ful tribunal? We die as we have lived: tremble lest your des- 
tiny of this day be your everlasting destiny. Quit, and from 
this moment, the ways of the sinful; begin now to live like the 
just, if you wish, on that last day, to be placed at the right 
hand, and to mount, along with them, into the abode of a bless- 
ed immortality. 



552 THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. [Serm. XXXI. 



SERMON XXXI. 
THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. 
Matthew v. 4. 
Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted. 
Sire, 

If the world were to speak to you in the place of Jesus 
Christ, it undoubtedly would not say, " Blessed are they who 
mourn." 

Happy, would it say, the prince who has never fought but to 
conquer, and whose mind has always been superior either to the 
danger or to the victory: who, during the course of a long and 
a prosperous reign, has enjoyed, and still continues to enjoy, at 
his ease, the fruits of his glory, the love of his people, the es- 
teem of his enemies, the advantage of his conquests, the splen- 
dour of his actions, the wisdom of his laws, and the august 
prospect of a numerous posterity; and who has nothing left now 
to desire but the continuance of what he possesses. 

In this manner, would the world speak; but, Sire, Jesus 
Christ does not speak like the world. 

Happy, says he to you, not him who is the admiration of his 
age; but he who makes his study of the age to come, and lives 
in the contempt of himself and of all the things of the earth; for 
to him is the kingdom of heaven. Not him whose reign and ac- 
tions history will immortalize in the remembrance of men; but 
he whose tears shall have effaced the history of his sins from the re- 
membrance even of God; for he shall be for ever consoled. Not 
him who, by new conquests, shall have extended the bounds 
of his empire; but he who has succeeded in confining his desires 
and his passions within the limits of the law of God; for he shall 
inherit a kingdom more durable than the empire of the universe. 
Not him who, exalted by the voice of nations above all preceding 
princes, tranquilly enjoys his greatness and his fame; but he who, 
finding nothing even on the throne worthy of his heart, seeks no 
perfect happiness on this earth but in virtue and in righteous- 
ness: for he shall be filled. Not him to whom men have given 
the pompous titles of great and invincible; but he to whom the 
wretched shall give, before the tribunal of Jesus Christ, the 
title of father and of merciful; for he shall be treated with mer- 
cy. Lastly, Happy not him who, always disposer of the lot of 
his enemies, has more than once given peace to the earth; but 
he who has been able to give it to himself, and to banish, from 



Serm. XXXI.] THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. 553 



his heart, all the vices and disorderly inclinations which disturb 
its tranquillity; for he shall be called a child of God. 

Such, Sire, are those whom Jesus Christ calls happy: and 
the gospel acknowedges no other happiness on the earth than 
virtue and innocence. 

Great God! it is not then that long train of unexampled 
prosperities, with which thou hast favoured the glory of his 
reign, that can render him the happiest of kings. He is thereby 
great; but he is not thereby happy. His felicity has commenced 
with his piety. Whatever does not sanctify man, can never 
make the happiness of man. Whatever does not place thee, O 
my God! in a heart, places only vanities which leave it empty 
or real evils which fill it with disquiet: and a pure conscience 
is the only resource of real enjoyments. 

It is to this truth that the church, on the occasion of this so- 
lemnity, confines its whole fruit. As the common error, that 
the life of the saints has been gloomy and disagreeable, is one 
of the principal artifices employed by the world in order to pre- 
vent us from imitating them, the church, in renewing their 
memory on this day, gives us to remember, at the same time, 
that not only they now enjoy an immortal felicity in heaven, 
but also that they have been the only happy of the earth, and 
that he who carries iniquity in his bosom always carries terror 
and anxiety; and that the lot of the godly is a thousand times 
more tranquil and more satisfactory, even in this world, than 
that of sinners. 

But in what does the happiness of the just in this life consist? 
It consists, 1st, In the manifestation of truth concealed from the 
sages of the world. 2d!y, In the relish of charity denied to the 
lovers of the world. In the lights of faith which soften all the 
sufferings of the believing soul, and which render those of the 
sinner still more bitter: this is my first point. In the comforts 
of grace which calm all the passions, and which, denied to a 
corrupted heart, leave it a prey to itself: is the last. Let us ex- 
amine these two truths, so calculated to render virtue amiable 
and the example of the saints beneficial. 

Part I. Our sorrows proceed, in general, from our errors; 
and we are unhappy only because we are inadequate judges of 
what is really good and evil. The just, who are children of 
light, are, therefore much happier than sinners, because they are 
more enlightened. The same lights which correct their judg- 
ments alleviate their sufferings; and faith, which shows the 
world to them such as it is, changes, into sources of consolation 
for them, the very same events in which souls, delivered up to 
the passions, find the principle of all their disquiets. 

And, in order to make you sensible of a truth so honourable 
to virtue, observe, I pray you, my brethren, that, whether a con- 
trite soul recal the past, and those times of error which prece- 



554 THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. [Serm. XXXI. 



ded his penitence; whether he pay attention to what passes be- 
fore his eyes in the world; or, lastly, whether he look forward 
to the future, every thing consoles, every thing strengthens him 
in the cause of virtue which he has adopted, every thing unites 
in rendering his condition infinitely more pleasing than that of 
a soul who lives in dissipation, and who finds, in these three 
situations only bitterness and inward terrors. 

For, in the first place, however the sinner may be delivered 
up to all fervency of his heart, he is not so violently hurried 
away, by present gratifications, but that he sometimes gives a 
look back to those years of iniquity which he amasses behind 
him. Those days of darkness, which he has consecrated to 
debauchery, have not so completely perished, but that, in cer- 
tain moments, they obtrude themselves upon his remembrance. 
Gloomy and troublesome images force themselves upon his soul, 
and, from time to time, arouse him from his lethargy by holding 
out, as if collected into one point, that shocking mass of crimes 
which make less impression, during their commission, because he 
only sees them in succession. At one glance of his eye he sees 
favours always contemned, inspirations always rejected, a vile 
perversion of a disposition naturally good and originally formed, 
it appears, for virtue; weaknesses at which he now blushes, 
phantoms and horrors against which he would wish for ever to 
shut his eyes. 

Such is what the sinner leaves behind him. He is miserable 
if he look back to the past. His whole happiness is, as it were, 
shut up in the present moment; and, to be happy, he must never 
think, but allow himself, like the dumb creation, to be led away 
by the attraction of the present objects; and, to preserve his 
tranquillity, he must either extinguish or brutify his reason. 
And thence those maxims so unworthy of humanity, and so cir- 
culated in the world, that too much reason is a sorry advantage; 
that rejection spoils all the pleasures of life; and that, to be 
happy, the less we think the better. O man ! was it for thy 
misery, then, that Heaven had given thee that reason by which 
thou art enlightened, or to assist thee in search of the truth, 
which alone can render thee happy? Could that divine light, 
which embellishes thy being, be a punishment rather than a gift 
of the Creator? And should it so gloriously distinguish thee 
from the beast, only that thy condition may be more wretched? 

Yes, my brethren, such is the lot of an unbelieving soul. In- 
toxication, delirium of passion, and the extinction of all reason* 
alone can render him happy; and, as that situation is merely 
momentary, the instant the mind becomes calm and regains it- 
self, the charm ceases, happiness takes wing, and man finds him- 
self alone with his conscience and his crimes. 

But how different, O my God; is the lot of a soul who walks 
in thy ways, and how much to be pitied is the world which 
knows thee not ! In effect, the sweetest thoughts of a righteous 



Serm. XXXL] THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. 555 



soul are those by which the past is recalled. He there encoun- 
ters, it is true, that portion of his life which had been engross- 
ed by the world and the passions; and the remembrance, I con- 
fess, fills him with shame before the sanctity of his God, and 
forces from him tears of compunction and sorrow. But what 
consolation in his tears and in his grief ! 

For, my brethren, a contrite soul can never retrace the whole 
train of his past errors, without discovering all the proceedings 
of God's mercy upon him. The singular ways by which his 
wisdom hath gradually, and, as it were, step by step, conducted 
him to the blessed moment of his conversion. So many unex- 
pected favourable circumstances, so many accidents of disgrace, 
of loss, of death, of treachery, and of affliction ; all provided by 
a watchful Providence to facilitate the means of breaking asun- 
der his chains. Those special attentions of God, even when in 
the paths of iniquity. Those disgusts, even in the midst of his 
pleasures, provided for him by his goodness. Those inward 
calls which incessantly whispered to him, return to virtue and 
to duty. That internal monitor which, go where he would, 
never left him, and unceasingly repeated to him, as formerly to 
St. Augustin : Fool ! How long wilt thou hunt after pleasures 
which can never make thee happy? When, by terminating thy 
crimes, wilt thou terminate thy troubles? What more is yet re- 
quired to open thine eyes upon the world, than thine own ex- 
perience itself, of thy weariness and unhappiness while serving 
it ? Try if, in belonging to me, thou shalt not be more happy, 
and if I suffice not to fill the soul which possesses me. 

Such is what the past offers to a contrite soul. It there sees 
the accomplices of its former pleasures still delivered up, by God's 
justice to the errors of the world and of the passions, and it 
alone chosen, separated, and called to the knowledge of the 
truth. 

With what peace and consolation does that reflection fill the 
believing soul! "How infinite, O my God," cries he with the 
prophet, " are thy mercies ! Thou hast covered me in my mo- 
ther's womb: Thou hast compassed my path, and my lying 
down, and all my ways have been known to thee: what have I 
done for thee more than so many other sinners whose eyes thou 
deignest not to open, and to manifest the severity of thy judg- 
ments and of thy justice? How marvellous, O God! are all thy 
works, and that my soul knoweth right well." First advantage 
of righteous souls : the remembrance eA r en of their past infideli- 
ties consoles them. 

But, secondly, if they find sources of solid consolation in re- 
viewing the past, their piety is not less comforted while viewing 
the present occurrences of the world. And here my brethren, 
you will presently see how essentially requisite is virtue to the 
happiness of life, and how that very world, which gives birth to 



556 THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. [Serm. XXXI. 



all the passions, and, consequently, to all the disquietudes of sin- 
ners, becomes the sweetest and most consolatory exercise of the 
faith of the just. 

What, indeed, is the world even to the worldly themselves, 
who love it, who seem intoxicated with its delights, and who 
cannot do without it? The world? It is an eternal servitude 
where no one lives for himself, and where, in order to be hap- 
py, we must bring ourselves to hug our chains, and to love our 
slavery. The world? It is a daily revolution of events, which 
successively arouse, in the hearts of its partizans, the most vio- 
lent and the most melancholy passions; cruel antipathies, hate- 
ful perplexities, torturing fears, devouring jealousies, and cor- 
roding cares. The world? It is a land of curse, where even its 
pleasures are productive only of bitterness and thorns. Gam- 
ing fatigues and exhausts by its frenzies and by its caprices : 
conversation becomes wearisome through the contrariety of tem- 
pers and the opposition of sentiments: passions and criminal 
attachments are followed with their disgusts, their disappoint- 
ments, and their unpleasant reports: theatres, no longer 
having as spectators but souls grossly dissolute and inca- 
pable of being roused but by the most shocking excesses of de- 
bauchery, become insipid while moving only those delicate 
passions, which only serve to show guilt from afar, and to lay 
snares for innocence. Lastly, the world is a place where hope 
itself, considered as a passion so sweet and so pleasing, renders 
all men unhappy; where those, who have nothing more to hope, 
believe themselves still more miserable; where every thing that 
pleases soon ceases to please; and where inanity or listless in- 
sipidity is almost the best and the most supportable lot to be ex- 
pected. Such is the world, my brethren; nor is this that ob- 
scure world, to which neither the great pleasures, nor the 
charms of prosperity, of favour, and of affluence are known: it 
is the world in its most brilliant point of view; it is the world of 
the court; it is you yourselves who now listen to me. Such is 
the world; nor is this one of those fanciful paintings of which 
the reality is nowhere to be found. I paint the world after your 
own heart, that is to say? such as you know it to be, and such as 
you yourselves continually experience it. 

Such, nevertheless, is the place in which all sinners seek their 
happiness. That is their country. There they would willing- 
ly eternize themselves. Such is that world which they prefer 
to the eternal inheritance, and to all the promises of faith. 
Great God! how just art thou in punishing man through his 
passions themselves, and to permit that, wishing to seek his 
happiness elsewhere than in thee, who alone art the true peace 
of his heart, he form for himself a ridiculous felicity of his fears, 
his disgusts, his wearinesses, and his disquietudes ! 

But that which is so fortunate here for virtue, is that the same 
world, so tiresome and so insupportable to sinners who seek their 



Serm. XXXL] THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. 557 



happiness in it, becomes a source of the most soothing reflections 
to the righteous, who consider it as an exilement and a foreign 
land. 

For, in the first place, the inconstancy of the world, so dread- 
ed by those delivered up to it, supplies a thousand motives of 
consolation to the believing soul. Nothing appears to him either 
constant or durable upon the earth; neither the most flourishing 
fortunes, nor the warmest friendships, nor the most brilliant 
reputations, nor the most envied favour. He sees a sovereign 
wisdom through all, which delights, it would appear, in making 
a sport of men, by alternately exalting them on the rains of each 
other; by hurling down those at the top of the wheel, in order 
to elevate those who, only a moment before, were grovelling at 
the bottom; by introducing every day, on the theatre of life, 
new heroes to eclipse all those who formerly played on it so 
brilliant a part; by incessantly giving new scenes to the uni- 
verse. He sees men passing their whole life in ferments, pro- 
jects, and plots; ever on the watch to surprise each other, or to 
avoid being surprised; always eager and active to profit of the 
retreat, the disgrace, or the death of a rival; and of these grand 
lessons, so fitted to inculcate contempt of the world, make only 
fresh motives of ambition and cupidity; always engrossed either 
by their fears or by their hopes; always uneasy either for the 
present or for the future; never tranquil, all struggling for 
quiet, yet every moment removing themselves farther and farther 
from it. 

O man ! why art thou so ingenious in rendering thyself mi- 
serable? Such is, then, the reflection of the believing soul. 
That happiness thou seekest is more easily attained. It is ne- 
cessary neither to traverse seas nor to conquer kingdoms. De- 
part not from thyself and thou wilt be happy. 

How sweet do the sorrows of virtue then appear to the godly 
man, when he compares them with the cruel chagrins and the 
endless agitations of sinners ! How transported to have at last 
found a place of rest and of safety, while he sees the lovers of 
the world still sadly tost about, at the mercy of the passions 
and of human hopes! Thus the Israelites, formerly escaped 
from the danger of the Red Sea, seeing from afar Pharaoh and 
all the nobility of Egypt still at the mercy of the waters, felt 
all the luxury of their own safety, thought the barren paths of 
the desert delightful, and were insensible to every hardship of 
their journey; and, comparing their lot with that of the Egyp- 
tians, far from giving vent to a complaint or a murmur, they 
sung with Moses that divine hymn of praise and of thanksgiv- 
ing, in which are celebrated, with such magnificence, the won- 
ders and the tender mercies of the Lord. 

2dly, The injustice of the world, so humbling to those who 
love it, when they see themselves forgotten, neglected, and 
sacrificed to unworthy rivals, is also a fund of soothing reflec- 



558 THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. [Serm. XXXI. 



tions to a soul who despises it and fears only the Lord. For, 
what resource is left to a sinner who, after having sacrificed his 
ease, his conscience, his wealth, his youth, and his health, to the 
World and to his masters; after having submitted in silence to 
every circumstance the most mortifying to the mind, sees at 
once, and without knowing why, the gates of favour and ad- 
vancement for ever shut against him; sees places snatched from 
him to which he was entitled by his services, and of which he 
thought himself already certain; threatened, should he dare to 
murmur, with the loss of those he still enjoys; forced to crouch 
to more fortunate rivals, and to be at the beck of those whom, 
only a little before, he had deemed unworthy of even receiving 
his orders? Shall he retire far from the world, to evaporate, in 
continual invectives against it, the spleen and the rancour of his 
heart, and thus revenge himself of the injustice of men? But 
of what avail will be his retirement?. It will afford only more 
leisure for retrospection and fewer relaxations from chagrin. 
Shall he try to console himself with similar examples? But our 
misfortunes never, as we think, resemble those of others; and, 
besides, what consolation can it be to have our sorrows renewed 
by seeing their image reflected from others? Shall he entrench 
himself in strength of mind, and in a vain philosophy? But, in 
solitude, reason soon descends from its pride; we may be phi- 
losophers for the public, but we are only men with ourselves. 
Shall he fly as a resource, to voluptuousness, and to other infa- 
mous pleasures? But, in changing the passion, the heart only 
changes the punishment. Shall he seek, in indolence and in- 
activity, a happiness he has never been able to find in all the 
fervency of hopes and pretensions ? A criminal conscience may 
become indifferent, but it is not thereby more tranquil. One 
may cease to feel misfortune and disgrace, but infidelities and 
crimes must always be felt. No, my brethren, the unhappy 
sinner is so without resource. Every comfort is for ever fled 
from the worldly soul from the moment that he is deserted by 
the world. 

But the righteous man learns to despise the world even in the 
contempt which the world has for him. The injustice of men, 
with respect to him, only puts him in mind that he serves a more 
equitable Master, who can neither be influenced nor prejudiced ; 
who sees nothing in us but what, in reality, there is; who de- 
termines our destinies upon our hearts alone, and with whom 
we have nothing but our own conscience to dread: consequent- 
ly, that they are happy who serve him; that his ingratitude is 
not to be feared; that every thing done for him is faithfully re- 
corded; that, far from concealing or neglecting our sufferings 
and our services, he gives us credit even for our good wishes; 
and that nothing is lost with him but what is not done solely 
for him. 

Now, in these lights of faith, what a fresh fund of consolation 



Serm. XXXI.] THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. 559 

for a believing soul ! How little is the world, in this point of 
view, with all its scorns and ill usage, capable of affecting him ! 
Then it is that, throwing himself into the bosom of God, and 
viewing, with Christian eyes, the nothingness and vanity of all 
human things, he feels in a moment all his inquietudes, insepa- 
rable from nature, changed into the sweetest peace; a ray of 
light shines in his soul, and re-establishes serenity; a trait of 
consolation penetrates his heart, and every sorrow is alleviated. 
Ah! my brethren, how sweet to serve him, who alone can ren- 
der happy those who serve him! Why, O blessed condition of 
virtue art thou not better known to men ! And wherefore art 
thou held out as a disagreeable and sorrowful lot, thou who a- 
lone canst console the miseries and alleviate all the sufferings 
of his banishment? 

Lastly The judgments of the world, source of so many cha- 
grins for the worldly, complete still more the consolation of the 
believing soul. For the torture of the lovers of the world is 
that of being continually exposed to the judgments, that is to 
say, to the censures, to the derisions, to the malignity of each 
other. In vain do we despise the men : we wish to be esteemed 
even by those we despise. In vain are we exalted above others: 
the more we are exalted, we are only the more exposed to the 
criticisms and to the observations of the multitude, and we 
much more poignantly feel the censures of those from whom 
homages alone were to have been expected. In vain may the 
suffrage of the public be in our favour; contempt is so much 
the more stinging as it is unusual and rare. In vain may we 
retaliate with censures yet more biting and keen; resentment 
and revenge always suppose a sense of guilt; and, besides, the 
chagrin of having encountered scorn is much more lively than 
any pleasure that can accrue from retorting it. Lastly, From 
the moment that you live solely for the world, and that your 
pleasures or your vexations depend wholly on it, the judgments 
of the world can never be indifferent to you. 

Nevertheless, it is in the midst of all these vexations that 
happiness must be at least professed. Every thing attributed 
to you, either by truth or vanity, is called in question: your 
birth, your talent, your reputation, your services, your success, 
your prudence, and even your honour. If you go to wreck, 
your incapacity accoimts for it: if successful, the honour is 
given to chance, or to your inferiors: if you enjoy the good 
opinion of the public, the judgment of the more knowing is ap- 
pealed to from the popular error; if possessed with the art of 
pleasing, it is immediately said that you have made a thorough 
use of your talents, and that you have been only too agreeable: 
if your conduct be superior to any attack, the most poignant ri- 
dicule is directed against your temper. Lastly, Be whom ye 
may, high or low, prince or subject, the most desirable situation 
for your vanity is that of being unacquainted with the world's 



560 THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. [Serm. XXXI. 



opinion of you. Such is the life of the world. The same pas- 
sions which bind us together, disunite us: envy and detrac- 
tion blacken our noblest qualities: and our gratifications find 
censurers even in those who copy them. 

But a believing soul is sheltered from all these uneasinesses. 
As he courts not the esteem of men, neither does he fear their 
scorn; as he has no intention of laying himself out to please, 
neither is he surprised to find that he has not done it. God, 
who sees him, is the only Judge he fears, and who, at the same 
time, consoles him for the judgments of men. His glory is the 
testimony of his own conscience. His reputation he seeks in 
the fulfilment of his duty. He considers the suffrages of the 
world as the rock of virtue or as the reward of vice; and, 
without even paying attention to its judgments, he is satisfied 
with giving it good examples. But what do I say, my breth- 
ren? The world itself, all worldly as it is, so full of censures, 
malignity, and contempt for its own worshippers, is forced to 
respect the virtue of those who hateth and despise it. It appears 
that virtue imprints, on the person of a real righteous man, a 
dignity, a something I know not what, of divine, which attracts 
the veneration and almost the worship of worldly souls : it ap- 
pears that his intimate union with Jesus Christ occasions his 
being irradiated, as I may say, like the three disciples on the 
holy mount, with a part of that celestial splendour which the 
Father shed around his well-beloved Son, and by which all li- 
berty ceases of refusing homage. It is an inalienable right 
which virtue has over the heart of men; and, by a deplorable 
caprice, the world despises the passions it inspires, and respects 
the virtue it strives against. Not that the esteem of the world, 
so worthy itself of being despised, can be any great consolation 
to the believing soul. But his consolation is, that he sees the 
world condemned even by the world, its pleasures decried even 
by those who hunt after them, sinners become the apologists of 
virtue, and the life of the world to pass sorrowfully away in do- 
ing what they condemn, and flying from what they approve. 

Such is the manner in which the present age becomes a 
source of consolatory reflections to a Christian soul; but, in the 
thought of futurity, he also finds consolations which are changed 
into inward and continual terrors for sinners: Last advantage 
drawn by the just from the lights of faith. The magnificence 
of its promises sustains and consoles them: they await the 
blessed hope, and that happy moment when they shall be asso- 
ciated with the church of heaven, re-united to their brethren 
whom they had left on the earth, received eternal citizens of 
the heavenly Jerusalem, incorporated in that immortal assem- 
bly of the elect, where charity will be the law that shall unite 
them; truth, the flame that shall enlighten them; and eternity, 
the measure of their felicity. 

These thoughts are so much the more consoling to the godly, 



Serm. XXXL] THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. 561 



as they are founded on the truth of God himself. They know 
that, in sacrificing the present, they sacrifice nothing; that, in 
the twinkling of an eye, all shall have passed away; that what- 
ever must have an end cannot long endure; that this moment 
of tribulation ought to be reckoned as nothing, when put in 
competition with that eternal weight of glory which he prepa- 
reth for us; and that the rapid passage of present things scarce- 
ly deserves that we should be at the pains of numbering the 
years and the ages. 

I know that faith may subsist with criminal manners; and 
that the sanctifying grace is often lost without losing a sincere 
submission to the truths revealed to us by the Spirit of God. 
But the certitude of faith, so consoling to the righteous soul, is 
no longer for the sinner who still believes but an inexhaustible 
fund of inward anxieties and cruel terrors. For, the more that 
sinners like you, who bear upon your conscience the sink of a 
whole life of irregularity, are convinced of the truths of faith, 
the more inevitable must the punishments and the misery ap- 
pear with which it threatens such sinners. All the truths of- 
fered to your faHh, in the holy doctrine, excite fresh alarms in 
your breast. Those divine lights, which are the source of all 
consolation to believing souls, become within you, only aven- 
ging lights, which disquiet, agonize, and judge you; which like 
a mirror, hold up continually to your sight what you would 
wish never to see; which enlighten you, in spite of yourselves, 
on what you would wish to be for ever ignorant. Your faith 
itself constitutes your punishment before-hand. Your religion 
is, here below, if I may venture to say so, your hell : and, the 
more you are convinced of the truth, the more unhappy do you 
live. O God ! how great is thy goodness towards man, in hav- 
ing rendered virtue necessary even to his quiet, and in thus at- 
tracting him to thee, by making it impossible for him to be hap- 
py without thee ! 

And here, my dear hearer, allow me to recal you to your- 
self. When the lot of a criminal soul should not be so fearful 
for the age to come, see if, even in this world, it appears much 
to be envied: his afflictions are without resource, his evils with- 
out consolation, even his pleasures without enjoyment; his 
anxieties upon the present endless, his reflections on the past 
and on the future gloomy and sad; his faith is the source of all 
his anguish; his lights of all his despair. What a situation! 
What a miserable lot ! What shocking changes are operated by 
one act of guilt, both internally and externally on man ! How 
dearly does he purchase eternal misery! And, is it not true 
that the way of the world and of the passions is still infinitely 
more arduous and painful than that of the gospel; and that 
there is more toil and vexation of spirit in gaining the kingdom 
of hell, if it be proper to speak in this manner, than in gaining 
the kingdom of heaven? O innocence of heart, what blessings 

n n 



562 THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. [Serm. XXXI. 



dost thou not bring with thee to man ! O man, what losest thou 
not when thou losest thine innocence of heart! Thou losest all 
the consolations of faith, the sweetest occupation of the piety of 
the righteous; but thou also deprivest thyself of all the comforts 
of grace by which the lot of the godly is rendered so truly en- 
viable here below. 

Part II. When comforts and consolations, says St Augus- 
tin, are promised to worldly souls in the observance of the law 
of God, they consider our promises as a pious mode of speaking, 
employed to give credit and consequence to virtue; and, as a 
heart which has never tasted of these chaste delights is also in- 
capable of comprehending them, we are obliged, continues that 
holy father, to reply to them, " How wouldest thou that we con- 
vince thee?" We cannot say unto thee, " O taste and see that 
the Lord is good!" seeing a diseased and vitiated heart can 
have no relish for the things in heaven. Give us a heart that 
loves, and it will feel the truth of every thing we say. 

My design, therefore, here, is not so much to enlarge upon 
all the inward operations of grace in the heart of the just, as to 
contrast the happy situation in which it places them, here be- 
low, with the melancholy lot of sinners, and, by this compari- 
son, to overwhelm vice and to encourage virtue. Now, I say, 
that grace provides two kinds of consolations here below to the 
godly: the one internal and secret, the other external and sen- 
sible; both of them so essential to happiness in this life, that 
no earthly gratification can ever compensate for them. 

The first internal benefit accruing to the believing soul from 
grace, is the establishment of a solid peace in his heart, and a 
reconciliation with himself. For, my brethren, we all bear 
within us natural principles of equity, of modesty, and of recti- 
tude. We come into the world, as the apostle says, with the 
precepts of the law written in the heart. If virtue be not our 
first bent, we, at least, feel that it is our first duty. In vain 
does passion sometimes undertake secretly to persuade us that 
we are born for pleasure; and that, after all, tendencies im- 
planted by nature, and which every one finds within himself, 
can never be crimes. This foreign persuasion is ineffectual in 
quieting the criminal soul. It is a desire, for we would hearti- 
ly wish to be lawful whatever pleases us; but it is not a real 
conviction. It is a saying, for it appears honourable to be a- 
bove all vulgar prejudices; but it is not a feeling. Thus, we 
always carry within us an incorruptible judge, who incessantly 
adopts the cause of virtue against our dearest inclinations;, who 
blends with our most headstrong passions the troublesome ideas 
of duty; and who renders us unhappy even amidst all our plea- 
sures and abundance. 

Such is the state of an impure and a sullied conscience. The 
sinner is the secret and constant accuser of himself; go where 



Serm. XXXI.J THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. 563 



he will, he carries a torment within which the hand of man 
cannot allay. Unhappy in being unable to conquer his lawless 
tendencies: more unhappy still in being unable to stiffle his in- 
cessant remorses. Enticed by his weakness, and withheld by 
his lights, the permission of every crime is a conflict with him- 
self: he reproaches himself for the iniquitous gratification, 
even in the moment of its enjoyment. What shall he do? 
Shall he combat his lights in order to appease his conscience? 
Shall he suspect his faith to sin in tranquillity? But unbelief 
is still a more horrible state than even guilt. To live without 
God, without worship, without principle, and without hope! 
To believe that the most abominable transgressions and the 
purest virtues are merely names ! To consider all men as only 
the vile and fantastical puppets of a low theatre, and merely in- 
tended for the amusement of the spectators ! To consider him- 
self as the offspring of chance, and the eternal possession of 
nonentity ! These thoughts have something, I know not what, 
of gloomy and horrible, that the soul cannot look upon without 
horror; and it is true that unbelief is rather the despair of the 
sinner than the refuge of the sin. What, then, shall he do? 
Continually obliged to fly himself, lest he find himself alone 
with his conscience, he ranges from object to object, from pas- 
sion to passion, from precipice to precipice. He thinks to com- 
pensate the emptiness and the insufficiency of pleasures by their 
variety; there is none which he does not try. But, in vain is 
his heart successively offered to all the created; all the objects 
of his passions reply to him, says St Augustin, " Deceive not 
thyself in loving us; we are not that happiness of which thou 
art in search; we cannot render thee happy: raise thyself a- 
bove the created, and, mounting to heaven, see if He who hath 
formed us be not greater and more worthy of being loved than 
we. Such is the lot of the sinner. 

Not that the heart of the just enjoys a tranquillity so unal- 
terable but that they, in their turn, experience troubles, disgusts, 
and anxieties here below. But these are passing clouds, which 
shade, as I may say, only the surface of their soul. A profound 
calm always reigns within,— that serenity of conscience, that 
simplicity of heart, that equality of mind, that lively confidence, 
that mild resignation, that calm of the passions, that universal 
peace, which begins, even from this life, the felicity of innocent 
souls. Vain creatures, what control have ye, over a heart which 
you have not made, and which is not made for you? First con- 
solation of grace, viz. peace of heart. 

The second is love, which mitigates to the just all the rigours 
of the law, and, according to the promise of Jesus Christ, 
changes his yoke, so insupportable to sinners, into a sweet and 
consoling yoke for them. For a believing soul loves his God 
still more fervently, more tenderly, and more truly, than he 
had ever loved the world. Every thing, therefore, even the 



564 THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. [Serm. XXXI. 



most rigorous, that he undertakes for him, is either no longer 
a trial to his heart, or becomes its sweetest care. For the at- 
tribute of the holy love, when master of the heart, is either to 
mitigate the sufferings it occasions, or to change them even into 
holy pleasures. Thus a soul enamoured of God, if I may dare 
to speak in this manner, pardons with joy, suffers with confi- 
dence, mortifies itself with pleasure, flies from the world with 
delight, prays with consolation, and fulfils every duty with a 
holy satisfaction. The more his love increases, the more does 
his yoke become easy. The more he loves, the happier he is: 
for it is the height of happiness to love what is become essential 
and necessary to us. 

But the sinner, the more he loves the world, the more un- 
happy he is: for the more he loves the world the more do his 
passions multiply, the more do his desires inflame, the more do 
his schemes get perplexed, and the more do his anxieties be- 
come sharpened. His love is the cause of all his evils: its vi- 
vacity is the source of all his sufferings; because the world, 
which is the cause of them, is incapable of furnishing him with 
their cure. The more he loves the world, the more is his pride 
stung by a preference; the more does his haughtiness feel an 
injury, the more does he sink under a disconcerted project; the 
more does a disappointed desire afflict him, the more does an 
unexpected loss weigh him down. The more he loves the 
world, the more do pleasures become necessary to him; and, as 
no one can fill the immensity of his heart, the more insupporta- 
ble does his weariness become : for weariness is the inseparable 
attendant of every pleasure; and, with all its amusements, the 
world, ever since it was a world, complains of its lassitude. 

And think not that, to accredit virtue, I here affect to exag- 
gerate the misery of worldly souls. I know that the world 
seems to have its happiness; and that, amid all that whirlwind 
of cares, motions, fears, and anxieties, a small number of for- 
tunate individuals is seen, whose happiness is envied, and who 
seem, in appearance, to enjoy a smiling and tranquil lot. But 
investigate these vain outsides of happiness and gladness, and 
you will find real sorrows, distracted hearts, and agitated con- 
sciences. Draw near to these men who, in your eyes, appear 
the happy of the earth, and you will be surprised to find them 
gloomy, anxious, and sinking under the weight of a criminal 
conscience. Hear them in those serious and tranquil moments, 
when the passions, more cooled, allow some influence to rea- 
son: they all confess that they are any thing but happy; that 
the blaze of their fortune shines only at a distance, and appears 
worthy of envy only to those who know it not. They confess 
that, amidst all their pleasures and prosperity, they have never 
been able to taste any pure and unadulterated joy; that the 
world, a little searched into, is nothing; that they are astonish- 
ed themselves how it can be loved when known; and that hap- 



Serm.XXXL] THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. 565 



py are they alone, here below, who can do without it and serve 
God. Some long for the opportunity of an honourable retreat; 
others are continually proposing to themselves more orderly and 
more Christian manners. All admit the happiness of the godly; 
all wish to become so; all bear testimony against themselves. 
They are the forced rather than the voluntary followers of plea- 
sure. It is no longer inclination, it is habit, it is weakness 
which retains them in the shackles of the world and of sin. 
They feel this; they lament it; they acknowledge it; and they 
give way to the current of so wretched a lot. Deceitful world ! 
render happy, if in thy power, those who serve thee, and then 
will I forsake the law of the Lord to attach myself to the van- 
ity of thy promises. 

You yourself, my dear hearer, since the many years that you 
served the world, have you greatly forwarded your happiness? 
Put in a balance, on the one side, all the agreeable moments 
and days you have passed in it, and, on the other, all the sor- 
rows and vexations you have there experienced, and see which 
scale will preponderate. In certain moments of pleasure, of ex- 
cess and of frenzy, you have, perhaps, said, " It is good for us 
to be here;" but that was only a momentary intoxication, the 
illusion of which the following moment discovered to you, and 
plunged you into all your former anxieties. Even now, when 
speaking to you, question your own heart: are you at peace 
within? Is nothing wanting to your happiness? Do you fear, 
do you wish for nothing? Do you never feel that God is not 
with you? Would you wish to live and die such as you are? 
Are you satisfied with the world? Are you unfaithful to the 
Author of your being without remorse? There are twelve hours 
in the day; are they all equally agreeable to you? And have 
you, as yet, been able to succeed in fashioning a conscience so 
as to remain tranquil in guilt? 

Even then, when you have plunged to the very bottom of the 
sea of iniquity to extinguish your remorses, and have succeed- 
ed, as you thought, in stifling that remnant of faith which still 
pleads in your heart for virtue, hath not the Lord commanded 
the serpent, as he saith in his prophet Amos, to follow and 
sting you even in the abyss where you had fled for shelter? 
And, even there, have you not felt the secret gnawings of the 
ravenous worm? Is it not true that the days you have conse- 
crated to God by some religious duty have been the happiest of 
your life; and that you have never lived, as I may say, but 
when your conscience has been pure, and that you . have lived 
with God? No, says the prophet, with a holy pride, the God 
whom we worship is not a deceitful God, nor is he, like the 
gods which the world worships, unable to reward those who 
serve him: let the world themselves be the judges here. 

Great God! What then is man thus to wrestle his whole 
life against himself, to wish to be happy without thee, in spite 



566 THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. [Serm. XXXI. 



of thee, in declaring himself against thee; to feel his wretched- 
ness, and yet to love it; to know his true happiness, and yet to 
fly from it? What is man, O my God! and who shall fathom 
his ways, and the eternal contradiction of his errors? 

Would I could finish what I had at first intended, and prove 
to you, my brethren, that the lot of the godly is still more wor- 
thy of all our wishes; for this reason, that, when the internal 
consolations happen even to fail them, yet they have the exter- 
nal aids of piety to strengthen and to assist them: the support 
of the sacrament, which, to the reluctant sinner, is no longer 
but a melancholy tribute to decency, equally tiresome and em- 
barrassing: the example of the holy, and the history of their 
wonders, from which the sinner averts his eyes, lest he see in 
them his own condemnation: the holy thanksgivings and pray- 
ers of the church, which, to the sinner, becomes a melancholy 
fatigue: and, lastly, the consolation of the divine writings, in 
which he no longer finds but menaces and anathemas. 

What invigorating refreshment, in effect, my brethren, to the 
mind of a believer, when, after quitting the vain conversations 
of the world, where the only subjects have been the exaltation 
of a family, the magnificence of a building, the individuals who 
act a brilliant part on the theatre of the universe, public cala- 
mities, the faults of those at the head of affairs, the events of 
war, and the errors with which the government is continually 
accused; lastly, where, earthly, they have spoken only of the 
earth; what a refreshment after quitting these, when, in order 
to breathe a little from the fatigue of these vain conversations, 
a believing soul takes up the book of the law, and finds, every- 
where in it, that it matters little to man to have gained the 
whole world, if he thereby lose his soul; that the most vaunted 
conquest shall sink into oblivion with the vanity of the con- 
querors; that the heavens and the earth shall pass away; that 
the kingdoms of the earth and all their glory shall waste away 
like a garment; but that God alone will endure for ever; and, 
consequently, that to him alone we ought to attach ourselves! 
The foolish have repeated vain things to me, O my God! says 
then this soul with the prophet; but, O how different from thy 
law! 

And certainly, my brethren, what soothing promises in these 
holy books! What powerful inducements to virtue! What 
happy precautions against vice! What instructive events! 
What sublime ideas of the greatness of God, and of the wretch- 
edness of man! What animated paintings of the deformity of 
sin, and the false happiness of sinners ! We have no need of 
thine assistance, wrote Jonathan and all the Jewish people to 
the Spartans; for, having the holy books in our hands to com- 
fort us, we have no occasion for the aid of men. And who, 
think you, my brethren, were these men who spake in this 
manner? They were the unfortunate remains of Antiochus's 



Serm. XXXI.] THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. 567 



cruelty, wandering in the mountains of Judea, despoiled of their 
property and fortunes, driven from Jerusalem and the temple, 
where the abomination of idols had taken place of the worship 
of the holy God; and, scarcely emerged from so afflicting a si- 
tuation, they are in need of nothing, for they have the holy 
books in their hands. And, in an extremity so new, surround- 
ed on all hands by nations of enemies, having no longer, in the 
midst of their army, either the ark of Israel or the holy taber- 
nacle; their tears still flowing for the recent death of the in- 
vincible Judas, who was alike the safeguard of the people and 
the terror of the un circumcised; having seen their wives and 
children murdered before their eyes; they themselves on the 
point every day of sinking under the treachery of their false 
brethren or the ambuscades of their enemies; the book of the 
law is alone sufficient to comfort and to defend them; and they 
think themselves in a situation to disclaim that assistance which 
an ancient treaty and alliance entitled them to demand. 

I am not surprised, after this, that, in the consolation of the 
Scriptures, the first disciples of the gospel should forget all the 
rage of persecution; and that, unable to bring themselves to 
lose sight of that divine book during life, they should desire it 
to be inclosed in their tomb after death, as if to guarantee to 
their ashes that immortality it had always promised to them; 
and likewise, as it would appear, to present it to Jesus Christ 
on the day of revelation, as the sacred claim by which they 
were entitled to heavenly riches, and to all the promises made 
to the righteous. 

Such are the consolations of believing souls upon the earth. 
How terrible, then, my brethren, to live far from God under 
the tyranny of sin ! always at Avar with one's self ; destitute of 
every real joy of the heart; without relish often for pleasures 
alike as for virtue; odious to men through the meanness of our 
passions; insupportable to ourselves through the capriciousness 
of our desires; hated of God through the horrors of our con- 
science; deprived of the comforts of the sacrament, seeing our 
crimes permit us not to approach it; deprived of all consolation 
from the holy books, seeing we find in them only threatenings 
and anathemas; without the resource of prayer, seeing the 
practice of it is forbidden, or at least the habit of it lost by a 
life wholly dissolute. What then is the sinner but the outcast 
of heaven and of the earth ! 

Thus, know ye, my brethren, what shall be the regrets of the 
reprobate on that great day, when to each one shall be rendered 
according to his works? You probably think that they will re- 
gret their past felicity, and shall say, 46 Our days of prosperity 
have slipt away like a shadow, and that world, in which we 
had spent so many sweet moments, is now no more: the dura- 
tion of our pleasures has been like that of a dream: our happi- 



568 THE HAPPINESS OF THE JUST. [Serm. XXXI. 



ness is flown, but, alas ! our punishments are to begin." You 
are mistaken; this will not be their language. Hear how they 
speak in the book of Wisdom, and such, as we are assured by 
the Spirit of God, they shall one day speak, " We never tasted 
pure delight in guilt; we have erred from the ways of truth, 
and the Son of righteousness hath never risen upon us : alas ! 
and yet that was only the beginning of our misfortunes and 
sufferings; we wearied ourselves in the way of wickedness and 
destruction; our passions have always been a thousand times 
more intolerable to us than could ever have been the most aus- 
tere virtues; and we have suffered more in working our own 
destruction, than would have been necessary to secure our sal- 
vation, and to be entitled to mount up now with the chosen into 
the realms of immortality. Fools that we are ! by a sorrowful 
and unhappy life to have purchased miseries which must endure 
for ever! 

Would you then, my dear hearer, live happy on the earth, 
live Christianly. Piety is universally beneficial. Innocence of 
heart is the source of true pleasures. Turn to every side; there 
is no rest, says the Spirit of God, for the wicked. Try every 
pleasure; they will never eradicate that disease of the mind, 
that fund of lassitude and gloom, which, go where you will, 
continually accompanies you. Cease then to consider the lot of 
the godly as a disagreeable and sorrowful lot; judge not of their 
happiness from appearances which deceive you. You see their 
countenance bedewed with tears; but you see not the invisible 
hand which wipes them away: you see their body groaning 
under the yoke of penitence; but you see not the unction of 
grace which softens it: you see sorrowful and austere man- 
ners; but you see not a conscience always cheerful and tran- 
quil. They are like the ark in the desert: it appeared covered 
only with the skins of animals: the exterior is mean or un- 
attractive; it is the condition of that melancholy desert. But, 
could you penetrate into the heart, into that divine sanctuary, 
what new wonders would rise to your eyes ! You would find it 
clothed in pure gold: you would there see the glory of God 
with which it is filled: you would there admire the fragrance 
of the perfumes, and the fervour of the prayers which are con- 
tinually mounting up towards the Lord; the sacred fire which 
is never extinguished on that altar; that silence, that peace, that 
majesty which reigns there; and the Lord himself, who hath 
chosen it for his abode, and who hath delighted in it. 

Let their lot inspire you with a holy emulation. It depends 
wholly on yourself to be similar to them. They perhaps have 
formerly been the accomplices of your pleasures ; why could you 
not become the imitators of their penitence? Establish, at last, 
a solid peace in your heart; begin to be weary of yourself. 
Hitherto you have only half lived; for it is not living to live at 



Serm. XXXII.] ON THE DISPOSITIONS, &c. 569 



enmity with one's self. Return to your God, who calls and 
who expects you; banish iniquity from your soul, and you will 
banish the source of all its sorrows; you will enjoy the peace of 
innocence; you will live happy upon the earth; and that tem- 
poral happiness will be only the commencement of a felicity 
which shall never fade nor be done away. 



SERMON XXXIL 

ON THE DISPOSITIONS FOR THE COMMUNION. 
Luke iii. 4-. 

Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. 

Behold what the church is continually repeating to us during 
this holy time in order to prepare us for the birth of Jesus 
Christ; prepare, says she to all her children, prepare the way 
of the Lord, who descends from heaven to visit and redeem his 
people; make his paths straight; let the hollows be filled up, 
and the mountains levelled; let the crooked ways become straight 
and the rugged even. Or to express the same meaning without 
metaphor; prepare yourselves, says she to us, to gather the 
fruit of that grand mystery which we are going to celebrate, by 
humiliation of heart, meekness and charity, rectitude of inten- 
tion, uniformity of living, renunciation of your own wisdom and 
your own righteousness; mortifying the flesh and humbling the 
spirit. 

Allow me to hold the same language to you Christians, my 
brethren, who, on this solemn occasion, come to purify your- 
selves in the penitential tribunals, in order to give a new birth 
to Jesus Christ in your hearts, on receiving him at the sacred 
table : prepare the way of the Lord. The deed you are going 
to perform is the most holy act of religion, and the source of 
the most special favours: undertake it not, therefore, without 
all the cares and all the precautions which it requires; do not 
expose yourselves, through your own fault, to lose the inesti- 
mable advantages which ought to accrue to you from it. 

The communion ought to give birth to Jesus Christ in our 
hearts ; but where would be the difference between the righteous 
man and the sinner, between the soul who discerns the body of 
the Lord, and him who treats it as a common food, were he 
equally to have birth in the heart of all who receive him? De- 
ceive not yourselves then, my brethren; there is a way of re- 
ceiving Jesus Christ, by which his presence is rendered useless 



570 ON THE DISPOSITIONS [Serm. XXXII. 



to us; and would to God, that, in thus receiving him, we de- 
prived ourselves only of those favours which follow a holy com- 
munion ! Ah ! my brethren, unless the communion gives birth 
to Jesus Christ in our hearts, it brings death to him there; if 
it do not render us participators of his spirit and of his grace, it 
is the sentence of our condemnation; if it be not a fruit of life 
to our soul, it is a fruit of death: terrible alternative which 
ought to excite our fears, but which ought not entirely to keep 
us away from the sacred table. The bread which is there dis- 
tributed is the true nourishment of our souls, the strength of 
the strong, the support of the weak, the consolation of the af- 
flicted, the pledge of a blessed immortality; how dangerous 
would it then be to abstain from it? But infinitely more so 
would it be to eat it without preparation. On that account I 
again repeat to you, my dearest brethren, with the church, 
" Prepare the way of the Lord:" let your preparations for re- 
ceiving him be of long standing; banish from your hearts what- 
ever may offend him; instruct yourselves in the dispositions 
which he exacts of those who receive him; use every effort to 
acquire them; there is no other mean of avoiding the risk of an 
unworthy communion, and of attracting Jesus Christ into your 
souls. 

This is an important matter, which demands all your atten- 
tion. On one side, there is question of making you shun the 
horrible crime of profaning the body and the adorable blood of 
Jesus Christ; on the other of instructing you how to reap from 
the communion all the grace which it is capable of bringing 
forth in our hearts. What, then, are those preparations so es- 
sential towards a profitable and worthy communion? I reduce 
them to four, which shall be the subject and the division of this 
discourse. 

Reflection. I. The eucharist is a hidden manna; it is the 
food of the strong, a sensible and permanent testimony of the 
love of Jesus Christ, the continuation and the fulfilment of his 
sacrifice. Now, it is necessary to know how to discern this 
hidden manna from common food, lest it be taken unworthily: 
first preparation. It is the food of the strong; we ought, there- 
fore, to examine ourselves before we venture to make use of it: 
second preparation. The testimony of the love of Jesus Christ; 
it can be received, therefore, only in remembrance of him, that 
is to say, in feeling aroused in his presence every tender and 
exquisite sensation which can be excited by the remembrance of 
a dear and beloved object: third preparation. It is the fulfil- 
ment of his sacrifice; every time, therefore, that we participate 
in it, we show his death, and we ought to bring there a spirit 
of the cross and of martyrdom: fourth preparation. A respect- 
ful faith which enables us to discern, a prudent faith which 
makes us to examine, an ardem t faith which enables us to love, 



Serm. XXXII.] FOR THE COMMUNION. 571 



an exalted faith which makes us to immolate; this is the sum- 
mary of the apostles' doctrine, in relating to us the institution 
of the eucharist, and likewise that of all the saints with regard 
to the use of that adorable sacrament. 

First preparation; a respectful faith which makes us to dis- 
cern. Think not, my brethren, that I mean here to speak of 
that faith which distinguishes us from unbelievers. Where is 
the merit of believing when the prejudices of childhood have 
accustomed reason to it, and when belief is, as it were, born 
with us! Exertion would even be necessary to cast off its yoke; 
and, to pass from faith to error, a greater effort is perhaps re- 
quired than to return from error to the truth. I speak of that 
lively faith which pierces through the clouds which surround 
the throne of the Lamb; which sees him not mystically, and, as 
it were, through a glass, but face to face, if I may venture to 
say so, such as he is: of that faith which, in spite of the veil 
with which the true Moses covers himself on his holy moun- 
tain, fails not, however, to perceive all his glory, and to feel 
the inability of supporting his presence: of that faith which, 
without rashly examining into his majesty, is, nevertheless, 
overpowered with its lustre; which sees the celestial legions 
covering themselves with their wings, and the pillars of the fir- 
mament shaking before this King of terrible majesty: of that 
faith to which the senses could add nothing, and which is blessed, 
not because it believes without seeing, but because it almost 
sees in believing. I speak of that respectful faith which is 
seized with a religious trembling at the sole presence of the 
sanctuary, which approaches the altar as Moses did the burning 
bush, and the Israelites the thundering mountain; of that faith 
which feels the whole weight of God's presence, and, in fear, 
cries out, like Peter, " Depart from me, for I am a sinful 
man, O Lord." I speak of that faith of which the respect ap- 
proaches almost to dread, and which it is even necessary to 
comfort; which, from the farthest spot that it discovers Jesus 
Christ upon the altar, feels an eclat of majesty which strikes 
and agitates it, and overpowers it with the dread of having ven- 
tured to come there without his order. 

Behold, my brethren, what that discernment of faith is which 
the apostle demands of you. Great God ! but doth any faith 
like this still remain on the earth? Ah! in vain dost thou still 
manifest thy presence to the world; it knows thee no better 
than formerly: thy disciples themselves often know thee but 
according to the flesh; and, by being constantly with thee, their 
eyes become habituated, and almost no longer discern thee. 
When thou shalt show thyself in the heavens upon a bright 
cloud, men shall be consumed with terror, and the impious shall 
seek to hide themselves in the deepest caverns, and shall in- 
treat the mountains to cover their heads : ah ! art thou not the 
same in the sanctuary as upon a cloud of glory? Are the heavens 



572 



ON THE DISPOSITIONS [Serm. XXXII. 



not opened above thee? When the priest pronounces the awful 
words, do not the heavenly spirits come down from heaven to 
officiate as thy servants, and to surround thee with their homa- 
ges? Dost thou not judge men upon that mysterious tribunal, 
and cast looks of discernment upon that multitude of worship- 
pers which fills thy temples? Dost thou not separate the goats 
from the sheep? Dost thou not there pronounce sentences of 
life and death? In one hand dost thou not hold thy wrath, and 
in the other crowns? Dost thou not separate me there, and stamp, 
with an invisible hand, upon my forehead, the mark of my 
election or of my eternal reprobation? Alas! and, while thou 
art perhaps condemning me, I have the presumption to draw 
near ; while thou art casting me off from before thee, I boldly 
present myself there; while thou perhaps layest open the abyss 
to mark out my place, I impudently come to take it at thy table; 
while thou perhaps art ranging me with thy children of wrath, 
I come to seat myself among the children of thy love: thy body, 
which giveth life, to me is a body of death; the Lamb without 
stain, which breaks the seven seals of the book of death, is the 
last seal which fills up and closes that of mine iniquities; and 
thou, who shouldst be my Saviour, becomest my guilt. 

Ah ! my brethren, God could not be seen in former times with- 
out instant death being the consequence. A whole people of 
Bethshemites was exterminated for having only too curiously 
examined the ark: the angel of the Lord covers Heliodorus with 
wounds, because he had dared to enter into the sanctuary of 
Jerusalem: the Israelites in the desert were not permitted even 
to approach the holy mountain from whence the Lord gave out 
his law; the thunders of heaven defended its access; terror and 
death everywhere preceded the face of the God of Abraham. 
What ! because whirlwinds of fire no longer burst forth to pun- 
ish the intruders and the profaners of our sanctuaries, respect 
and dread no longer accompany us there! Weak men, over 
whom the senses have such dominion, and who are never re- 
ligious but when the God whom they worship is clothed in 
terror! For, say, were we to discern the body of the Lord; 
did the faith of his presence make those grand impressions upon 
us which it would undoubtedly do were we openly to see him; 
ah ! would we tranquilly and almost unfeelingly come to seat 
ourselves at his table? Should a few moments, employed in re- 
citing, with a languid heart and an absent mind some slight 
formula, prepare us for an action so lawful ! Should a com- 
munion be the business of an idle morning, perhaps gained from 
a customary slumber or the vain cares of dress? Ah! the 
thoughts of it should long previously occupy and affect us : time 
should even be necessary to strengthen us, if I may venture to 
say so, against our feelings of respect, and against the idea of 
his majesty: the days previous to this sacred festival should be 
days of retirement, of silence, of prayer, and of mortification: 



Serm. XXXIL] FOR THE COMMUNION. 573 



every day which brings us nearer to that blessed term, should 
witness the increase of our anxieties, our fears, our joy. The 
thoughts of it should be mingled with all our affairs, all our con- 
versations, all our meals, all our relaxations, and even with our 
sleep itself: our mind, filled with faith, should feel its inability 
to pay attention to any thing else; we should no longer per- 
ceive but Jesus Christ: that image alone should fix all our at- 
tention. Behold what is meant by discerning the body of the 
Lord. 

I know that a worldly soul experiences inward agitations at 
the approach of a solemnity in which decency, and perhaps the 
law, require his presence at the altar. But, O my God! thou 
who fathomest these troubled hearts, are such those religious 
terrors of faith which should accompany a humble creature to 
thy altar? Ah! it is a sadness which operates death; these are 
inquietudes which spring from the embarrassments of a conscience 
which requires to be cleared. They are gloomy and sad, like 
the young man of the gospel whom thou orderedst to follow thee: 
they dread these blessed days as fatal days: they look upon as 
dark and gloomy mysteries, all the solemnities of Christians; 
the delights of thy feast become a fatigue to them: they only 
partake of it like the blind and the lame of the gospel: that is 
to say, that the laws of thy church must drag these faithless 
souls, as if by force, from the public places, from the pleasures 
of the age, and from the highway of perdition, and bring them, 
in spite of themselves, into the hall of thy feast: they delay, as 
much as possible, this religious duty; the sole thought of it 
empoisons all their pleasures. Thou seest these unbelieving 
souls dragging on the load of a wavering conscience; long hesi- 
tating betwixt their duties and their passions; softening at last, 
by the choice of an indulgent confessor, the bitterness of this 
step; appearing before thee, O God! who becomest their nou- 
rishment in this mystery of love, with as much reluctance as if 
they went to face an enemy; and, perhaps, in the course of a 
whole year, experiencing no other circumstance to grieve them 
than that of receiving a God who gives himself to them. Ah ! 
Lord, therefore thou invisibly rejectest these guilty victims who 
oblige themselves to be dragged by force to the altar, thou who 
wiliest none but voluntary sacrifices: therefore thou reluctantly 
givest thyself to these ungrateful hearts who unwillingly receive 
thee; and, wert thou still capable of being troubled in the spirit^ 
as thou permittedst to be visible over the tomb of Lazarus, ah ! 
we should once more see thee groaning when thou enteredst 
those profane mouths which, in thy sight, are only open sepul- 
chres, as they have long been troubled before they could prevail 
upon themselves to appear here to pay that homage. 

Let us acknowledge, then, my dearest brethren, that the faith 
which makes us to discern the body of Jesus Christ is very rare. 
We believe, but with a superficial faith, which only skims the 



574 ON THE DISPOSITIONS [Serm. XXXII. 



surface, as I may say, without entering into the efficacy and the 
mysteries of this sacrament: we believe, but with an indolent 
faith, which grounds its whole merit in submitting without 
opposition: we believe, but with an inconstant faith, which pro- 
fesses to believe, but denies it in works: we believe, but with 
a human faith, which is the gift rather of our fathers according 
to the flesh, than of the Father of Light: we believe, but with 
a popular faith, which leaves us only weak and puerile ideas: 
we believe, but with a superstitious faith, which tends to nothing 
but vain and external homages; we believe, but with a faith 
merely of custom, which feels nothing: we believe, but with an 
insipid faith, which no longer discerns: we believe, but with a 
convenient faith, which is never followed with any effects: we 
believe, but with an ignorant faith, which fails either in respect 
through familiarity, or in love through its backwardness: we 
believe, but with a faith which enchains the mind, and leaves 
the heart to wander: lastly, we believe, but with a tranquil and 
vulgar faith, in which there is nothing either animated, grand, 
sublime, or worthy of the God which it discovers to us. Ah ! 
to discern thy body, Lord, through faith, it is to prefer this 
heavenly bread to all the luxuries of Egypt; it is to render it 
the only consolation of our exilement, the tenderest soother of 
our sufferings, the sacred remedy of all our evils, the continual 
desire of our souls; it is, through it, to find serenity under all 
the frowns of fortune, peace in all our troubles, and equanimity 
under all the stings of adversity; it is to find in it an asylum 
against our disgraces, a buckler to repel the flaming darts of 
Satan, a renovated ardour against the unavoidable lukewarm- 
nesses of piety. To discern thy body, Lord, it is to devote more 
cares, more attention, and more circumspection towards wor- 
thily receiving thee, than to all the other actions of life. To 
discern thy body, Lord, it is to respect the temples in which 
thou art worshipped, the ministers who serve thee, and our bo- 
dies which receive thee. Let every man examine himself, let 
him thereupon listen to the testimony of his own conscience; 
and this is the second preparation, a prudent faith, which makes 
us to prove ourselves: let a man examine himself. 

Reflection II. I know that we are unacquainted with our 
own heart; that the mind of man is not always informed of 
what takes place in man; that the passions seduce, examples 
harden, and prejudices drag us away; that our inclinations are 
always victorious over our lights; that the heart is never in th& 
wrong; that, to examine one's self, is frequently only to harden 
one's self in error. Such is man, O my God ! delivered up to 
his own understanding : he is continually deceived, and nothing 
appears to his eyes but under fictitious colours; he but imper- 
fectly knows thee; he hardly knows himself; he comprehends 
nothing in all that surrounds him; he takes darkness for light; 



Serm. XXXIL] FOR THE COMMUNION. 575 



he wanders from error to error; he quits not his errors when 
he returns to himself: the lights alone of thy faith can direct 
his judgment, open the eyes of his soul, become the reason of 
his heart, teach him to know himself, lay open the folds of self- 
love, expose all the artifices of the passions, and exalt him to 
that spiritual man, who conceives and judges of all. By the 
rules of faith, then, my brethren, must we examine ourselves; 
all human doctrines, the compromises of custom, the examples 
of the multitude, our own understanding, all are deceitful 
guides; if ever it were of importance not to be deceived, it sure- 
ly is in a conjuncture where sacrilege is the consequence of 
mistake. 

But upon what shall we examine ourselves? Upon what! 
Upon the holiness of this sacrament, and upon our own corrup- 
tion. It is the body of Jesus Christ, it is the bread of angels, 
it is the Lamb without stain, who admits none around his altar 
but those who either have not defiled their garments or who 
have purified them in the blood of penitence. And what art 
thou, forward soul, whom I see approaching with so much con- 
fidence? Bringest thou there thy modesty, thine innocence? 
Hast thou always possessed the vessel of thy body in honour 
and in holiness? Hath thy heart not been dragged through the 
filth of a thousand passions? In the sight of God, is not thy 
soul that blackened brand of which the prophet speaks, which 
impure flames had blasted and consumed from thine earliest 
years, and which is no longer but a shocking vestige of their 
fury? Art thou not totally covered with shameful wounds? Is 
there a spot upon thy body free from the mark of some crime? 
Where wilt thou place the body of the Lamb? What! it shall 
rest upon thy tongue; that pure and immaculate body upon a 
tomb which hath never exhaled but infection and stench; that 
body immolated with so much gentleness upon the instrument 
of all thy vengeances and bitterness; that crucified body on the 
seat of all thy sensualities and debauches. What! he shall de- 
scend to thy heart? But will he therein find where to repose 
his head? Hast thou not changed that holy temple into a den 
of thieves? What! thou art going to place him among so many 
impure pleasures, profane attachments, ambitious projects, emo- 
tions of hatred, of jealousy, and of pride; it is amidst all these 
monsters that thou hast prepared his dwelling-place? Ah! thou 
deliverest him up to his enemies, thou once more puttest him 
into the hand of his executioners. 

You have examined yourselves, say you to me. Before draw- 
ing near you have made your confession. Ah ! my brethren, 
and, with the same mouth from which you have so lately vented 
all your iniquities, you go to receive Jesus Christ? And, the 
heart still reeking with a thousand ill-extinguished passions, 
and which to-morrow shall see in all their wonted vigour, you 
dare to approach the altar with your present, and to participate 



576 



ON THE DISPOSITIONS [Serm. XXXII. 



in the holy mysteries? And, the imagination still stained with 
the ideas of those recent excesses which you have just been re- 
counting to the priest, you go to eat of the pure bread of the 
chosen ? What ! on your departure from the tribunal, the com- 
munion, in your eyes, supplies the place, and answers the pur- 
poses of penitence? From guilt you rush headlong to the altar? 
In place of dissolving in tears with the penitent, you come to 
rejoice with the righteous? In place of nourishing yourself with 
the bread of tribulation, you run to a delicious feast? In place 
of lingering at the gate of the temple, like the publican, you 
confidently draw near to the holy of holies? In former times, 
a penitent came not to the table of the Lord but after whole 
years of humiliation, of abstinence, of prayer, and of austerity, 
and they purified themselves in tears, in grief, and in the public 
exercises of a painful discipline; they became new men; a 
heartfelt regret was the only vestige of their former life; no 
traces of their past crimes were to be recognized but in the 
grace of penitence, and of the macerations which, at last, had 
expiated them; and the eucharist was that heavenly bread 
which no man, a sinner, then ate but with the sweat of his brow. 
And, at present, to have confessed crimes is believed to have 
already punished them; that an absolution, which is only given 
under the supposition of a humbled and contrite heart, actually 
creates and renders it so; that all the purity required of those 
who receive the body of Jesus Christ is, that they have laid 
open all the virulence and infection of their sores. Unworthy 
communicants, my brethren ! you eat and you drink your dam- 
nation: In vain may we comfort you; can man justify when 
God condemns? 

Besides, it is pure and without leaven; it requires to be 
exempted from leaven to eat of it: Now, have those worldly 
persons, whom the circumstances of a solemnity determine to 
approach the holy table, quitted the old leaven in presenting 
themselves at the altar! Do they not bring along with them 
every passion still living in its roots? Judge thereof from the 
consequences. On their departure from thence they find them- 
selves exactly the same; hatreds are not extinguished, the em- 
pire of voluptuousness is not weakened, animation in the pur- 
suit of pleasures is not blunted, inclination for the world is not 
less violent; in a word, cupidity has lost nothing of its rights. 
We see no greater precautions than before against dangers al- 
ready encountered; the society of the world again resumes its 
influence; conversations are renewed; the passions awaken; 
every thing resumes its former train, and, in addition to their 
former state, they have now to add the profanation of this awful 
mystery. How is this? It is that a simple confession is no ex- 
amination of one's self. 

Again, it is the food of the strong. A weak, sickly, and 
wavering soul, who turns with every wind; who gives way to 



Serm. XXXII.] FOR THE COMMUNION. 577 



the first obstacle; who founders upon the first rock; who escapes 
every moment from the guidance of grace; who has a long ex- 
perience of his own frugality; who never brings to the altar but 
promises a hundred times violated, but momentary sensations 
of devotion, which the very first pleasure stiffles; who, from his 
earliest years, has been in the alternate practice of weaknesses 
and holy things, and who has seen a constant succession of crimes 
to repentance, and of the sacrament to relapses: is a soul of this 
description a strong soul? Is it not its duty to examine itself, 
to increase, to strengthen, and to exercise itself in charity? 
Scarcely in a state to digest milk, ought it to load itself with 
solid food, and such as can serve the purposes of nourishment 
only to the perfect man? 

It is written in the law, that, if the sin-offering be placed in 
an earthen vessel, the vessel shall immediately be broken; but, 
if in a brazen vessel, it shall be both scoured aud rinsed in water. 
Would these circumstances, so carefully and minutely marked, 
be worthy of the holy Spirit, did they not contain instructions 
and mysteries? Doth not a weak soul, who receives the true 
victim, resemble that earthen vessel which falls in pieces, as I 
may say, being unable to endure the violence of this sacred fire? 
On the contrary, the firm soul, like the brass, is purified, loses 
in it all its stains, and comes out from it more beautiful and bril- 
liant than before. What is the consequence, according to Jesus 
Christ, of putting new wine into old bottles; do they not burst, 
and allow the wine to be lost upon the ground? WTiat is the ap- 
plication of this parable? You put the mystical wine, that wine 
whose strength operates a holy intoxication in pure souls, into 
a decayed and worn-out heart, which long-established passions 
have almost consumed. Ah ! I am not surprised that it is un- 
able to endure its strength, that the blood of Jesus Christ can- 
not tarry there, and that, on the first occasion, you shed and 
trample it under foot; it required to have gradually accustomed 
your heart to it, to have prepared it by retirement, by prayer, 
by daily conquests over yourself; and, through the means of 
these continued and salutary trials, to have strengthened and 
rendered it capable of receiving Jesus Christ. 

It is the passover of Christians: now, Jesus Christ celebrates 
his passover with his disciples alone. 

Now, what is it to be his disciples? It is to renounce one's 
self, to carry his cross, to follow him. Are you mortified in your 
desires, patient under your afflictions? Do you walk in the ways 
in which Jesus Christ hath walked before you? To be his dis- 
ciples is mutually to love each other? and how often have you 
come to eat of this bread of union, how often have you made 
your appearance at this banquet of charity, your heart inwardly 
loaded with gall and bitterness against your brother? How often 
have you come to offer up your present at the altar, without 
having reconciled yourself with him? 

o o 1 



578 



ON THE DISPOSITIONS [Serm. XXXII. 



Lastly, It is a God so pure, that the stars are dimmed in his 
presence; so holy, that, after the fall of the angel, heaven was 
rent, and the abyss opened that he might place an eternal chaos 
between sin and him; so jealous, that a single wandering desire 
injures and offends him. Thus, my brethren, it is necessary 
that you examine yourselves upon your own inclinations. Are 
not those desires of the age of which the apostle speaks, still 
nourished within you? Render glory to God, and, in his pre- 
sence, search your hearts to the bottom. I go to eat of the 
body of Jesus Christ, and to convert it into my own substance; p 
but, when he shall have entered into my soul, he who knows 
and discerns its intentions and most secret inclinations, will he 
find nothing there unworthy of the sanctity of his presence? 
He will immediately proceed to the spring and to the causes of 
my wanderings; he will examine whether their source be dried 
up, or their course only suspended; he will perceive what are 
still the dominant inclinations of my soul, and what is the weight 
which still turns the balance of my heart: Alas! will he be en- 
abled to say, as formerly when enteringinto the house of Zaccheus, 
" This day is salvation come to this house?" Have I sincerely 
cast off that passion so fatal to my innocence; that bitterness 
of heart, of which I have so lately expressed my detestation at 
the feet of the priest; that idolizing of riches, which leads me 
to grasp at even iniquitous profits; that madness of gaming, by 
which my health, my affairs, and my salvation are injured; that 
vexatious and variable temper, which the slightest contradiction 
inflames; that vanity, which leads me to soar above the rank in 
which my ancestors had left me; that envy, which, with malig- 
nant eyes, has always viewed the reputation and the prosperity 
of my equals; that proud and censorious air, which judges upon 
all, and never judges itself; that supreme influence over me 
of effeminacy and voluptuousness, which are, as it were, inter- 
woven with the foundation and principle of my being? Has the 
avowal, which I come from making, of my weaknesses, to the 
minister of Jesus Christ, rooted them out from my heart? Am I 
a new creature? He alone who is regenerated can aspire to this 
heavenly bread which I am going to eat: in thine eyes am I so, 
O my God? Do I not bear the name of living, though still, in 
effect, dead? Will the Mighty, entering into my soul, possess it 
in peace, and will he not find there seven unclean spirits who 
shall chase him from it? Instruct me, Lord, and suffer not that 
thy Christ, that thy holy, descend into corruption. Such, my 
brethren, is the way to examine ourselves. The Lord had for- 
merly forbidden the Jews to offer up honey and leaven in the 
sacrifices: see if, in approaching the altar, you bring not with 
you the leaven of your crimes, and the honey of voluptuousness : 
that is to say, both that relish for the world and for pleasure, 
and that effeminate and sensual character, enemy of the cross, 
and incompatible with salvation. Approach not, if you do not 
feel yourself sufficiently pure: this holy body, says the prophet, 



Serm. XXXII.] FOR THE COMMUNION. 



579 



would not purge your iniquity, it would only increase it; your 
religion would be vain, your heart idolatrous, your sacrifice a 
sacrilege. 

Examine, therefore, yourself, and afterwards eat of the hea- 
venly bread. But we are not to stop at the simply discerning 
and examining. Hitherto, you have only removed the obstacles; 
but you have not settled the last preparations : you have lopt off 
whatever might repel Jesus Christ from your soul; but you 
have not acquired what might attract him to it : you have ar- 
ranged so as not to receive him unworthily; but you have not 
so as to receive him with fruit: it is not sufficient to be free 
from guilt; it is necessary to be clothed with righteousness and 
sanctity: it is little not to betray him like Judas; it is necessary 
to love him with the other disciples: it is little, in a word, to be 
no longer profane, worldly, voluptuous, effeminate, proud, and 
revengeful; it is necessary to be sedate, meek, humble, firm, 
chaste, believing, Christian. " As oft as ye do this, do it in 
remembrance of me:" this is the third disposition to communi- 
cate in remembrance of Jesus Christ. 

Reflection III. What is it to communicate in remembrance 
of Jesus Christ? It is, in the first place, internally to describe 
all that passed in the heart of Jesus Christ in instituting this 
adorable sacrament. " With desire," said he to his disciples, 
" I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer." 
He sighed for that blessed moment; he never lost sight of it; in 
the remembrance of it he was comforted for all the bitterness of 
his passion. What did he thereby mean to teach us? Ah! that 
we ought to bring to this divine table a heart inflamed, penetra- 
ted, consumed; an eager, earnest and impatient heart; a hun- 
ger and a thirst after Jesus Christ; an inclination roused by 
love: in a word, what I have termed a burning desire which 
impels us to love. This bread, said a father, requires a famish- 
ed heart. Ah! Lord, says then the believing soul with St 
Augustin, who will give me that thou may est enter into my 
heart to take possession of it; wholly to fill it; to reign there 
alone: to dwell there with me even to the consummation of 
ages; to be mine all; there to constitute my purest delights; 
to shed through it a thousand inward consolations; to satiate, 
to gladden it, to make me forget my miseries, mine anxieties, 
my vain pleasures, all mankind, the whole universe, and to leave 
me wholly to thee? Perhaps, Lord, the tenement of my soul is 
not yet sufficiently embellished to receive thee; but come and 
be thyself all its ornament. Perhaps thou perceivest stains 
which repel thee from it; but thy divine touch will purify them 
all. Perhaps thou discoverest invisible enemies still there; but 
art not thou the mighty? Thy sole presence will disperse them, 
and peace alone will reign there when once thou shalt be in 
possession of it. Perhaps it has wrinkles which render it for- 



580 



ON THE DISPOSITIONS [Sekm. XXXII. 



bidding; but thou wilt renew its youth like that of the eagle. 
Perhaps it is still stained with the blemishes of its former infi- 
delities; but thy blood will wash them entirely out. Come, 
Lord, and tarry not: every blessing will attend me with thee: 
despised, persecuted, afflicted, despoiled, calumniated, I will 
consider as nothing my sorrows from the moment that thou 
shalt come to alleviate them: honoured, favoured, exalted, sur- 
rounded with abundance, these vain prosperities will cease to 
interest me, will appear as nothing from the moment thou shalt 
have made me to taste how sweet thou art. Such are the de- 
sires which ought to lead us to the altar. 

But, alas ! many bring there only a criminal disgust and re- 
pugnance: occasions are required to induce them to determine 
upon it; of themselves they would never have thought of it. 
But, what do I say, occasions? Thunders and anathemas are 
required. Good God! that the church should be reduced, 
through the lukewarmness of Christians, to make a law to them 
of participating in thy body and in thy blood ! That penalties 
and threatenings should be required to lead them to thy altar, 
and to oblige them to seat themselves at thy table ! That the 
Christian's only felicity on earth should be a painful precept to 
him! That the most glorious privilege with which men can be 
favoured by thee should be an irksome restraint to them ! Others 
approach it with a heavy heart, a palled appetite, a soul wholly 
of ice: people who live in the commerce of pleasures and of the 
sacrament; who participate at the table of Satan and at that of 
Jesus Christ ; who have stated days for the Lord, and days al- 
lotted for the age; people to whom a communion costs only a day 
of restraint and reservation; who, on that day? neither gamble, 
show themselves, see company? nor speak evil. But this exer- 
tion goes no further; ail devotion ceases with the solemnity: it 
is a deed of ceremony ; after this short suspension they are at 
ease with themselves; they smoothly continue to live in this 
mixture of holy and of profane; the sacrament calms us upon 
pleasures; pleasures to be more tranquil on the side of the con- 
science leads us to the sacrament; and they are almost good in 
order to be worldly without scruple. Thus they bring to the 
altar a taste cloyed with the amusements and the delights of the 
age, with the embarrassments of affairs, with the tumult of the 
passions: they feel not the ineffable sweets of this heavenly food; 
they retrace, even at the foot of the throne of grace, the images 
of those pleasures they have so lately left, interests which oc- 
cupy ns, projects which puzzle us, ideas which force us from the 
altar to drag us back to the world, make much deeper impres- 
sions upon the heart than the presence of Jesus Christ. But is 
it not, Lord, against those monsters of Christians that thy pro- 
phet, incensed, formerly said to thee, " Ah! Lord, let thy table 
become a snare before them; and that which should have been 
for their welfare, let it become a trap." 



Serm. XXXIL] FOR THE COMMUNION. 581 



In the second place, To communicate in remembrance of Jesus 
Christ, is to wish to awaken, through the presence of this sa- 
cred pledge, every impression which his memory can make upon 
a heart which loves him. The firmest bonds are loosened by 
absence: Jesus Christ well foresaw, that, ascending up to hea- 
ven, his disciples would insensibly forget his kindnesses and his 
divine instructions. Alas ! Moses remains only forty days upon 
the mountain, and already the Israelites cease to remember the 
miracles that he had wrought to deliver them from Egypt. We 
wot not, said they among themselves, what is become of this 
Moses, the man that brought us out of the land of Egypt; let 
us make gods who shall go before and defend us against our 
enemies. Jesus Christ, to guard against these inconstancies of 
the human heart, wished, in ascending to the heavenly Sion, to 
leave us a pledge of his presence: it is there that he wishes we 
should come to console ourselves for his sensible absence; it is 
there that we ought to find a more lively remembrance of his 
wonders, of his doctrine, of his kindnesses, of his divine person ; 
it is there that, under mysterious signs, we come to see him born 
at Bethlehem, brought up at Nazareth, holding discourse with 
men, and traversing the cities of Judea, working signs and mir- 
acles which no one before him had ever done, calling as follow- 
ers rude disciples, in order to make them masters of the world, 
confounding the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, announcing salva- 
tion to men, leaving marks everywhere of his power and good- 
ness, entering in triumph into Jerusalem, led to Mount Calvary, 
expiring upon a cross, conqueror of death and of hell, leading 
with him into heaven those who were captives, as the trophies of 
his victory, and forming afterwards his church with the over- 
flowing of his Spirit and the abundance of his gifts; in a word, 
we shall there find him in all his mysteries. 

You envy, said St Chrysostom, the lot of a woman who 
touches his garments, of a sinful one who bathes his feet with 
her tears, of the women of Galilee who had the happiness to fol- 
low and to serve him in the course of his ministry, of his disci- 
ples with whom he familiarly conversed, of the people of those 
times who listened to the words of grace and of salvation which 
proceeded from his mouth; you call blessed those who saw him; 
many prophets and kings have vainly wished it; but you, my 
brethren, come to the altars, and you shall see him; you shall 
touch him, you shall give him a holy kiss, you shall bathe him 
with your tears, and your bowels shall bear him even like those 
of Mary. Alas ! our fathers went into the holy land to worship 
the traces of his feet, and the places that he had consecrated 
with his presence. Here, they were told, he proposed the par- 
able of the good shepherd and the lost sheep; here he reconcil- 
ed an adultress; here he comforted a sinful woman ; here he 
sanctified the marriage and the feast with his presence; here he 
multiplied the loaves to fill a famished multitude; here he check- 



582 



ON THE DISPOSITIONS [Serm. XXXII. 



ed his disciples who wanted to bring fire from heaven upon a 
criminal city; here he deigned to hold converse with a woman 
of Samaria; here he suffered the children around him, and 
rebuked those who wanted to drive them away; here he re- 
stored sight to the blind, made the lame to walk, delivered those 
possessed with devils, made the dumb to speak, and the deaf to 
hear. At these words our fathers felt themselves transported 
with a holy joy; they shed tears of tenderness and of religion 
upon that blessed land; this sight, these images, carried them 
back to the times, to the actions, to the mysteries of Jesus Christ, 
inspired them with fresh ardour, and consoled their faith; sin- 
ners found there a sweet trust, the weak a new force, and the 
righteous new desires. 

Ah ! Christians ; it is not necessary that you cross the seas ; 
salvation is at your hand; the word which we preach to you 
will be, if you wish it, upon your mouth and in your heart; 
open the eyes of faith, behold these altars; they are not places 
consecrated formerly with the presence, it is Jesus Christ him- 
self: approach in remembrance of him; come to rekindle all that 
your heart hath ever felt of tender, affecting, and lively, for 
this divine Saviour. Let the remembrance of his meekness, 
which would not permit him to break the reed already bruised, 
nor to extinguish the yet glimmering lamp, quiet your transports 
and impatiences: let the remembrance of his toils and of his 
troublesome life overwhelm you for your effeminacy: let the 
remembrance of his modesty and of his humility, which made 
him fly when they wanted to make him king, cure you of your 
vanities, of your schemes, of your frivolous pretensions: let the 
remembrance of his fast for forty days reproach you for your 
sensualities: let the remembrance of his zeal against the pro- 
fan ers of the temple teach you with what respect, and with what 
holy dread, you ought to enter there: let the remembrance of 
the simplicity and frugality of his manners condemn the vain 
superfluities and the excesses of yours: let the remembrance of 
his retirement and of his prayers warn you to fly the world, to 
retire sometime into the secrecy of your house, to pass, at least 
some portion of the day, in the indispensable practice of prayer : 
let the remembrance of his tender compassion for a famished 
people give you bowels of commiseration for the unfortunate: 
let the remembrance of his holy discourses teach you to con- 
verse innocently, holily, and profitably with men: in a word, 
let the remembrance of all his virtues, there more lively, more 
present to the heart and to the mind, correct you of all your 
weaknesses: this is what is called to communicate in remem- 
brance of him. 

But, to bring continually to the altar the same weaknesses; 
to familiarize ourselves in such a manner with the body of Jesus 
Christ, that it no longer awakens in us a new sentiment, but 
leaves us always such as we are: to nourish ourselves with a 



Serm. XXXIL] FOR THE COMMUNION. 



583 



divine food, yet not to increase; frequently to approach this 
burning furnace without any additional heat to your lukewarm- 
ness; to appear there with faults a hundred times detested yet 
still dear, with habits of imperfection, which though light in 
themselves, are no longer so, however, through the attachment 
and the bent which render them inevitable to us, and through 
the circumstance of the sacrament which there is the risk of 
profaning; to make profession of piety, of estrangement from 
the world, to be almost every day in the commerce of holy 
things, and to have determined, as it were, upon a limited point 
of virtue beyond which never to rise, and, after ten years' exer- 
cise of piety, to be no farther advanced than at first; on the 
contrary, to have rather relaxed from the first fervour; to be 
continually applying to this divine remedy, yet to feel no alter- 
ation for the better in the disease; to heap sacrament upon sa- 
crament, if I may dare to say so, yet never to empty the heart 
in order to make room for this heavenly food : to nourish envies, 
animosities, secret attachments, a fund of sensuality, of vain de- 
sires to please, to be courted, to be prosperous; to permit, in 
conversation, the habit of witticisms and every freedom of 
speech upon others, of endless nothings, of sentiments wholly 
profane, of quibbles which wound sincerity, of concealments by 
which falsehood becomes familiar, of hastiness and bursts of 
passion; to be jealous to an extreme whenever self is concerned; 
to rise indignant at the smallest appearance of neglect, and to be 
incapable of digesting a single disobliging gesture; and yet, with 
all this to feed upon the bread of angels ; O my God ! how much 
less than this ought to make us tremble! 

But, is it to eat of this bread unworthily, to eat it with so 
many imperfections and weaknesses ! Who knows this, O Lord, 
but thee? All that we know is, that it is in not communicating in 
remembrance of thee; that many righteousnesses shall appear 
in thy sight, at the great day, as a soiled cloth; that many, who 
had even prophesied in thy name, shall be rejected; and that 
every thing is to be dreaded in this state. Peter is not admit- 
ted to thy supper till after thou hadst washed his feet; never- 
theless, thou assurest us that he was altogether pure. Magda- 
lene is sent away, and thou sayest unto her, " Woman, touch 
me not," because a too sensible affection was the cause of her 
eagerness; and, nevertheless, her love had been great, and she 
had washed thy sacred feet and her own sins with her tears. 
And we, Lord, full of wants, empty of sincere fruits of penitence, 
made up wholly of effeminacy and sensualities, lukewarm, and 
without desire, fixed in a certain state of languishing and imper- 
fect piety, more sustained by habitude and the engagements of 
a holy profession than by thy grace or by a lively and solid 
faith, alas ! we make thy body our ordinary food. What inex- 
plicable gulfs, Lord! What a train of crimes, perhaps, not 
known, unrepented of, multiplied to infinity, and which are as 



584 



ON THE DISPOSITIONS [S*rm. XXXII. 



the shoot upon which a thousand new profanations are after- 
wards grafted! What gulfs, once more! And what terrible 
secrets shall thy light make manifest to us at the great day ! 
In thy sight, O my God, what am I! I can neither offend nor 
please thee by halves; my condition admits not of those middle 
states of virtue which holds as it were, a mid way betwixt inno- 
cence and guilt; if not a saint, I am a monster; if not a vessel of 
honour, I am a vessel of shame; if not an angel of light, there 
is no room to hesitate, I am an angel of darkness; and, if not 
a living temple of thy spirit I mast be its profaner. Good God ! 
what powerful motives for vigilance, for self-examination, for 
circumspection, for approaching thiue altars with trembling; 
for humility, tears, and compunction, while waiting the mani- 
festation of thine adorable judgments ! But still, my brethren, 
it is not enough to communicate in remembrance of Jesus Christ ; 
and in order to retrace his life, it is likewise necessary, and this 
is the last disposition, to renew the remembrance of his death, 
and to show him whenever we eat of his body and drink of his 
blood; and this is what I call a noble faith which leads us to 
sacrifice. 

Reflection IV. As oft as you shall eat of the body and 
drink of the blood of the Lord, you will show his death until 
the kingdom of God shall come. How this? Literally speak- 
ing his death is shown, because this mystery was a prelude to 
his passion; because Judas there determined to betray him; be- 
cause Jesus Christ, eager to undergo that baptism of blood 
with which he was to be baptised, anticipated its fulfilment, and 
sacrificed himself beforehand by the mystical separation of his 
body and of his blood; because the eucharist is the permanent 
sacrifice of the church, the fruit and the fulness of that of the 
cross : lastly, because Jesus Christ is there as in a state of death, 
he hath a mouth and speaks not; eyes and uses them not; feet 
and walks not. But, my brethren, in that sense the impious, 
equally as the just man, shows the death of the Lord as oft as 
he eats of his body: it is a mystery, and not a merit; it is the 
nature of the sacrament, and not the privilege of him who re- 
ceives it; it is a consequence of its institution, and not a dispo- 
sition for approacliing it. Now, the design of the apostle here, 
is to prevent the abuses, to instruct believers how to eat wor- 
thily of the body of the Lord, to explain to them, in the mys- 
teries contained in this sacrament, the dispositions which it re- 
quires. There is a way, therefore, of showing the death of the 
Lord, which should be wholly in our hearts, which disposes and 
prepares us, which fits the situation of our soul to the nature of 
this mystery, which makes us to bear upon our body the mor= 
tification of Jesus Christ, which immolates and crucifies us with 
him. Let us resume the reasons we have touched upon, and 
rhange the letter into spirit. 



Serm. XXXII.] FOR THE COMMUNION. 



585 



1st, The death of the Lord is shown, because this mystery 
was a prelude to his passion. In former times the eueharist was 
a prelude to martyrdom. From the moment that the rage of 
the tyrant was declared, and the persecution begun, all the be- 
lievers run to provide themselves with this bread of life; they 
carried this precious trust into their houses: death seemed less 
terrible to them when they had before their eyes the beloved 
pledge of their immortality; they even desired it; and the in- 
effable consolations which the presence of Jesus Christ, hidden 
under mystical veils, already shed through their soul, made 
them to long for that torrent of delight with which he will over- 
flow his chosen when they shall behold him face to face. Were 
they dragged to prison, and, like felons, loaded with irons, they 
of whom the world was unworthy, they carefully concealed the 
divine eueharist in their bosom; they feasted upon it in the 
hope of martyrdom; they grew fat upon this heavenly food, like 
pure victims, that their sacrifice might be more pleasing to the 
Lord. Chaste virgins, fervent believers, holy ministers, par- 
took altogether of the blessed bread: and what delight even in 
their chains ! What serenity of mind in these dark and gloomy 
abodes! What songs of thanksgiving in these horrible places 
where the eye encountered nothing but the sad images of death 
and preparations for the most cruel tortures ! How often did 
they say to Jesus Christ, present with them in this adorable 
sacrament: Ah! we fear no ill, Lord, since thou art with us; 
though hosts surround us yet will we not be afraid: our ene- 
mies may destroy our bodies, but thou wilt restore them to us 
glorious and immortal; for who can destroy those whom the 
Father hath bestowed upon thee? Blessed chains which thou 
deignest to sustain ! Holy prisons which thou consecratest with 
thy presence ! Beloved dungeons in which thou fillest our souls 
with so many lights ! Precious death which is to unite us with 
thee, and to withdraw the veil which conceals thee from our 
sight ! Thence what fortitude under their tortures ! Filled with 
the body of Jesus Christ, washed in his blood, they quitted their 
prisons, says a holy father, like lions out of their den still 
raging and thirsting for death and carnage; they flew upon the 
scaffolds, and, with a holy pride, launched here and there looks 
of confidence and magnanimity which appalled the most fero- 
cious tyrants, and even disarmed their executioners : they show- 
ed then the death of the Lord in preparing themselves for 
martyrdom by the communion. 

The tranquillity of our ages, and the religion of the Caesars, 
leave us no longer the same hope; death is no longer the re- 
ward of faith, and the eueharist makes no more martyrs: but 
have we not domestic persecutors? Has our faith only tyrants 
to dread? And is there not a martyrdom of love as well as of 
blood? In approaching the altars, then, my brethren, a believing 
soul sighs for the dissolution of his mortal body; for, could he 



586 



ON THE DISPOSITIONS [Serm. XXXII. 



love this life, and show the death of Jesus Christ, and renew, 
in these mystical signs, his quitting the world to go to his 
Father? He complains of the length of his exilement; he bears, 
to the foot of the sanctuary, a spirit of death and of martyr- 
dom: "Ah! Lord, since thou art dead and crucified to the 
world, why detain me there? What can I find upon the earth 
worthy of my heart, seeing thou art no longer there? The mys- 
tery itself, which should console me through thy presence, re- 
cals to me thy death; these covers which veil thee are an arti- 
fice of thy love; and thou half concealest thyself, only to inspire 
my heart with the desire of fully beholding thee. Vain things, 
what offer ye to me but an empty shadow of the God whom 
I seek? What answer do ye make when my softened heart 
bends towards you to soothe its anxieties? Return, say you, to 
him who hath made us; we groan in awaiting his coming to 
deliver us from this servitude, which makes us subservient to 
the passions and to the errors of men : seek him not among us, 
thou wilt not find him, — he is risen, he is no longer here; if he 
appear, it is only to die again; recal the desires and the affec- 
tions which thou meant to place upon us, and turn them to- 
wards heaven; the bridegroom hath been carried away, the 
earth is no longer for a Christian now but a vale of mourning 
and tears: such is what they answer to me. What then detains 
me here, Lord? What are the ties and the charms which can 
attach me to the world? Restless in pleasures, impatient in 
absence, tired of the conversations and the commerce of men; 
afraid of solitude; without relish for the world, without relish 
for virtue; doing the evil I would not, and leaving undone the 
good that I would; — what keeps me here? What delays the 
dissolution of this body of sin? What prevents me from soaring 
with the wings of the dove upon the holy mountain? I feel that 
I should then be happy; I could then feast at all times upon 
this delicious bread: I taste no real delight but at the feet of 
thy altars; these are, indeed, the happiest moments of my life: 
but they are so short, and I must so soon return to the insipidi- 
ties and disgusts of the world; I am under the necessity of 
being so long absent from thee: no, Lord, there is no perfect 
happiness on the earth, and death is a gain to whoever knows 
to love thee." 

Are these our sentiments, my brethren, when we draw near 
to the altars! Where are now the Christians, who, like the 
first believers, await the blessed hope, and hasten, by their 
sighs, the end of their banishment, and the coming of Jesus 
Christ? This is a refinement of piety of which they have no 
idea; it is merely a language of the speculist; it is, however, 
the groundwork of religion, and the first step of faith. The 
necessity of dying is considered as a cruel punishment; the sole 
idea of death, with which our fathers were so comforted, makes 
us to shudder; the end of life is the term of our pleasures in 



Serm. XXXIL] FOR THE COMMUNION. 



587 



place of being that of our sufferings; the attentions paid to the 
body are endless; our precautions extend even to absurdity; or, 
if it sometimes happen that this last moment is desired, it is in 
consequence of being wearied of life and its chagrins; it is a 
disgrace, a habitual infirmity preying upon us, a revolution in 
our worldly matters which leaves no more pleasures to be ex- 
pected here below, the disappointment of an establishment, a 
death, an accident, or, lastly, a disgust and a wish of self-love; 
we tire of being unfortunate, but we are not eager to go to be 
re-united with Jesus Christ; and, with all this, they come to eat 
of the Lord's Supper, to renew the remembrance of his passion 
and to show his death until he shall come: What an outrage! 

2dly, His death is shown in this mystery, because Judas 
there finally determined upon delivering him up. Now, what 
does this remembrance exact of us? Ah ! my brethren, an ar- 
dent desire of repairing, by our homages, the impiety of so 
many shocking communions which crucify Jesus Christ afresh. 
So many impure, revengeful, worldly, and extortioning sinners, 
of every people and of every nation, receive him into profane 
mouths: we ought to feel the insults which Jesus Christ there- 
by suffers; to humble ourselves before him, seeing that his 
most signal blessing is become the occasion of the greatest 
crimes; to tremble for ourselves; to admire his goodness, which, 
for the profit of a small number of chosen, hath graciously been 
willing to submit to the indignities of that endless number of 
sinners, of all ages and of all time, who have, and still continue 
to dishonour him; to avert, by the tears of our heart and a 
thousand inward lamentations, the scourges which unworthy 
communions never fail to draw down upon the earth. For, if 
the apostle formerly lamented that general plagues, epidemical 
diseases, and sudden deaths were only a consequence of the pro- 
fanation of the sacrament; ah! thy finger has long been upon 
us, Lord; the cup of thy wrath is poured out upon our cities 
and provinces: thou armest kings against kings, and nations 
against nations: nothing is now spoken of but battles and the 
rumours of war; our fields are stricken with sterility; our 
families are consumed by the sword of the enemy, and the fa- 
ther is deprived of the only prop and consolation of his old age : 
we groan under burdens, which, though keeping the enemy of 
the state from our walls, yet leave us a prey to famine and want; 
the arts are now almost of no avail to the people; commerce 
languishes, and industry can hardly supply the common neces- 
saries of life; yet what are even the public calamities, when 
compared with the private miseries known to thee alone? We 
have seen our citizens mowed down by hunger and death, and 
our cities turned into frightful deserts; the enemy of thy name 
takes advantage of our dissensions, and usurps thine inheritance. 

Whence proceed these scourges, great God! so continued 
and so terrible? Where are formed those clouds of wrath and 



588 



ON THE DISPOSITIONS [Serm. XXXII. 



indignation which have so long been pouring out their torrents 
upon us? Is it not to punish the sacrilegious that thou art 
armed? Do not the outrages which are every day committed 
against thy body, at the feet of the altars, draw down upon us 
these marks of thy wrath? O strike us then, Lord, and avenge 
thy glory; stop not the arm of thy angel who hovers over us; 
let the houses where the traces of a profane blood are still im- 
printed not be spared; thine anger is just. But no; give us not 
the water of gall because we have sinned against thee: give 
peace in our days; listen to the cries of the righteous who in- 
treat it of thee: " Lord," say they with the prophet, " we look- 
ed for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health, and 
behold trouble." Terminate the profanations which are ever the 
attendants of war; cease to punish sacrileges by multiplying 
them on the earth; once more restore majesty to so many tem- 
ples profaned, worship and dignity to so many churches despoil- 
ed, peace to our cities, abundance to our families, consolation and 
gladness of heart to Israel; let the child be restored to his father 
and the husband to the desolate wife; and, if our evils touch 
thee not, O pay attention to the miseries of thy church. 

3dly> The death of the Lord is shown in this mystery, for Je- 
sus Christ sacrifices himself in it, by the mystical separation of 
his body and of his blood. What follows from thence? That 
we must be at the foot of the altar as if it were at the foot of 
the cross: that we must enter into the dispositions of the disci- 
ples and of the women of Jerusalem who received the dying sigh 
of Jesus, and were present at the consummation of his sacrifice. 
Now, what hatred had they not against a world which had cru- 
cified their Master? What measures did they think it necessary 
to keep with his murderers? Were they afraid of declaring 
themselves the disciples of him who had so openly declared 
himself their Saviour, and that at the price of his blood? Did 
they not say to the heavenly Father, Ah ! strike us, Lord, who 
are the guilty, and spare the innocent. What horror at their past 
faults, which had attached so good a Master to the cross ! What 
a lively impression in their heart of his sufferings ! Thus, my 
brethren, still to keep measures with the age, to be afraid of 
declaring openly for piety, to be ashamed of the cross of Jesus 
Christ, to calculate your works of devotion in such a way that 
an air and a savour of the world may still pervade the whole : 
not boldly to confess Jesus Christ; to be afraid of abstaining 
from a theatre where he is insulted, from an assembly where he 
is offended, from a proceeding by which innocence must suffer, 
from I know not what train of life of which the world makes 
a necessity to you, from certain maxims which wound the gospel, 
and which custom has established as laws; to pretend to keep up 
all those conciliatory measures with the world, and yet to come 
to eat the passover with the disciples of Jesus Christ; to pre- 
serve a correspondence with his enemies, and yet to seat your- 



Serm. XXXII.] FOR THE COMMUNION. 



589 



selves at his table; to esteem the maxims which crucify him, 
and yet to wish to be the spectators and the faithful companions 
of his cross; ah! it is a contradiction. 

He hath overcome the world; he hath fixed it to his cross: 
along with himself he hath given death to its maxims and errors: 
consequently, to show his death in the communion is to renew 
the memory of his victory. And, if the world lives and still 
reigns in your heart, my brother, do you not annihilate the 
fruit of his death? Do you not contest with Jesus Christ the 
honour of his triumph? And, in place of showing his death, do 
you not come to renew it with his enemies? 

Besides, in the fourth place, his death is shown in this mys- 
tery, for it is the consummation of the sacrifice of the cross, and 
he applies the fruit of it to us. Now what gives us a right to 
the fruit of the cross, and, consequently, to the communion? 
Sufferance, mortification, and a penitent and inward life. For, 
say, living in delights, shall you dare to nourish a body, like 
yours, enervated by pleasures, flattered, caressed; shall you 
dare, I say, to nourish it with a crucified body? Shall you dare 
to incorporate Jesus Christ, dying and crowned with thorns, 
with delicate and sensual members? Would this connexion not 
be horrible? Will you dare, by converting his body into your 
own substance, to transform it into an effeminate and voluptuous 
body? Ah! it would be the perfection of iniquity. To be nour- 
ished with the body of Jesus Christ your members must become 
his members; his body must take the figure of your body. 
Now, his body is a crucified body; his members are suffering 
members; and, if you live without suffering; if you bear not 
upon your body the mortification of Jesus Christ; if, perhaps, 
you have never practised a single instance of self-denial; if 
your days are passed in a tranquil effeminacy; if afflictions ex- 
cite impatience; if you feel hurt at every thing which opposes 
your honour; if you prescribe to yourself no works of mortifi- 
cation; if those sent to you by heaven are unwillingly and un- 
thankfully received; how will you that you unite your body to 
that of Jesus Christ? This is never reflected upon, my brethren; 
and, nevertheless, a soft and sensual life can be a presage only 
of an unworthy communion. 

Lastly The death of the Lord is shown in this mystery, for 
he is there himself as in a state of death. He hath a mouth 
and speaketh not; eyes and useth them not; feet and walketh 
not. View then, my brother, and act according to this model; 
behold how you ought to show his death in partaking of his 
body : you must bring there eyes instructed to be closed for the 
earth; a tongue accustomed to silence, or to sayings of God, as 
St. Paul says ; feet and hands immoveable for the works of sin ; 
senses either extinguished or mortified: in a word, to bring 
there a universal death over your body: the state of Jesus 
Christ in the eucharist is the state of the Christian on earth; a 



590 



ON THE DISPOSITIONS [8e km. XXXII. 



state of retreat, of silence, of patience, of humiliation, of divorce 
from the senses. For, what is Jesus Christ in the eucharist? 
He is in the world as if not there; he is in the midst of men, 
but invisible; he hears their vain discourses, their chimerical 
plans, their frivolous expectations, but he enters not into them; 
he sees their solicitudes, their agitations, and their enterprises, 
and he allows them to act; divine honours are paid to him, and 
he is insulted; and, ever the same, he seems insensible alike to 
the insults as to the homages: he looks on while families, em- 
pires, and ages are renewed; manners are changed; the taste of 
men and of ages are incessantly fluctuating: he sees customs 
sink into decay and then revive; the figure of this world in an 
eternal revolution; his inheritance divide; wars, seditions, and 
unexpected revolutions ; the whole universe shaken ; and he is 
tranquil upon its ruins; and nothing withdraws him from his 
close and ineffable study of his Father; and nothing interrupts 
the divine quiet of his sanctuary, where he is always living for 
the purpose of interceding for us. Once more, consider and act 
according to this model: let us bring to the sacred table eyes 
long since closed upon every thing which may hurt our soul; a 
tongue surrounded with a guard of circumspection and of mo- 
desty; ears chaste and impenetrable to the hissings of the ser- 
pent, and to the luxury of those sounds and voices so calculated 
to soften the heart; a soul alike insensible to scorn or to praise; 
a soul beyond the reach of the things of this earth, and proof 
against all the revolutions of life; the same in good or in bad 
fortune; viewing, with indifferent eyes, every occurrence here 
below; esteeming the good or the evil which occur to him as a 
matter that does not regard him; and, through all the agitations 
of the earth, the tumult of the senses, the contradiction of 
tongues, the vain enterprises of men, always watchful to guard 
over his peace of heart, to move continually with a steady pace 
towards eternity, never to lose sight of his God, and to have his 
conversation always in heaven. 

Not that I would exclude from the altar all those who have not 
yet attained to this state of death: alas! it is the business of a 
whole life; and the body of Jesus Christ is an aid established 
to fortify and to assist us in this undertaking. But our incli- 
nation ought to bend to it, lest we approach the altar unworthily; 
we must be at open war with the senses, with our own corrup- 
tion, with our own weaknesses, and be continually gaining the 
advantage in some article; Christian self-denial must be prac- 
tised; the daily victories, which the impressions of the world 
and of the senses gain over us, must be expiated by retirement, 
by silence, by tears, and by prayer; we must rise with fresh 
vigour from every backsliding. But, I mean you to understand 
that a communion is not the concern of a day, or of a solemnity; 
that our whole life ought to be a preparation for the eucharist; 
that all our actions should be as steps which lead us up to the 



Serm. XXXII.] FOR THE COMMUNION. 



591 



altar; that the life of too many in the world, even of those who 
are not in debauchery, who restrict themselves upon nothing, 
who live according to the senses, who are warm only on the in- 
terests of the earth, is a life which shows not the death of the 
Lord, and which, consequently, excludes you from this mystery. 
I mean you to comprehend, that the eucharist is a festival, if I 
dare to say so, of mourning and death; that delights, pleasures, 
and vain decorations disfigure this sacred table, and occasion 
your being rejected equally as him who appears there without 
the wedding-garment: that the meats of the earth and the bread 
of heaven cannot be eaten at the same time; and that, on the 
morrow after the Israelites had eaten of the old corn of the land 
of Canaan, the manna ceased, neither had they any more of that 
heavenly food. I mean you to comprehend, that this sacrament 
is the fruit and not the mark of penitence; that those commun- 
ions, determined by a solemnity, gave rise to more profaners 
than true worshippers; that the body of Jesus Christ cannot be 
eaten without living by his spirit; that the plenitude of the 
holy Spirit must even rest upon a soul, as upon Mary, before 
Jesus Christ can enter into it, as it were, to assume once more 
the human nature. I mean you to understand, that nothing should 
alarm you more, you who live in the dangers of the age and who 
love them, than all the communions of which you have partaken 
without preparation. I mean you to understand that the bread 
of life becomes a poison to the majority of believers; that the 
altars witness almost more crimes than the theatre; that Jesus 
Christ is more insulted in his sanctuary than in the assemblies 
of sinners; and that the solemnities are no longer but mysteries 
of mourning for him, and days set apart to dishonour him. I 
mean you, in a word, to understand, that, in order to approach 
it worthily, a respectful faith is required which enables us to 
discern; a prudent faith, which leads us to examine ourselves; 
a lively faith, which causes us to love; a noble faith, which in- 
duces us to sacrifice ourselves: without these it is rendering 
one's self guilty of the body and of the blood of the Lord; it is 
eating and drinking their own condemnation. 

Ah, Lord! how little have I hitherto known the innocence 
and the extreme purity which thou requirest of those who come 
to eat of this heavenly food! The Centurion, that man of so 
fervent, so humble, and so enlightened a faith; that man so rich 
in good works, who loved thy people, who raised up edifices to 
thy name, and appropriated them to public prayers, and to the 
interpretation of thy Scriptures; that man does not think him- 
self worthy even to receive thee into his house : even the purest 
of virgins, when informed by the angel that thou wert to descend 
into her womb, is terrified at it; she contemplates her own no- 
thingness; and, if the power of speech still remains to her, it is 
to ask, how can this be? And who am I, Lord, to dare to seat 
myself at thy table with so little precaution? I, who come to 



592 



ON THE DISPOSITIONS, &c. [Serm. XXXII. 



appeax* empty before thee; who have nothing to offer to thee but 
the refuse of a heart so long engrossed by the world; who 
bring to thine altars only feeble aspirations after holiness and 
unsubdued attachments to the world; but unavailing lights; but 
sentiments which evaporate in vain wishes. 

Ah, Lord! the fruits of a holy communion are so abundant, 
so sensible; the soul quits it so overflowed with thy blessings 
and thy grace, that, when I had no other proof of the unworthi- 
ness of my communions than their inefficacy, I ought to trem- 
ble and be humbled. When thy body is eaten worthily, we abide 
in thee, and thou abidest in us : that is to say, that thy precious 
blood, which still flows in our veins, leaves us thy inclinations, 
thy traits, thy resemblance, and that we are another thee; noble 
and heavenly inclinations should alone be seen in us, and senti- 
ments worthy of the blood we have received: and, nevertheless, I 
still find my affections drawn to the earth. When thy body is 
eaten worthily, thou tellest us that we live for thee, and eternal- 
ly : and I have still continued to cherish worldly pursuits and 
schemes of ambition. What then must I do, Lord? Must I retire 
from thy table? What! this fruit of life should be forbidden me? 
What! the bread of consolation should no longer be broken for 
me? No, Lord, thou dost not mean to exclude me from it, but only 
that I be prepared for it; thou refusest me not the bread of child- 
ren, but thou wouldest that mine unworthiness force thee not to 
give me a serpent in place of it. Prepare then thyself in mine 
heart an abode worthy of thee; make the rough and crooked ways 
of it smooth, and let the heights be levelled; purify my desires; 
correct my inclinations, or rather create within me new ones. 
Thou alone canst be thy precursor, and prepare the way for thee in 
souls. Fill us then, Lord, with thy spirit, to the end that we 
may eat of thy body worthily, and live eternally for thee. 
Now, to God, &c. 



THE END, 



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